Those considering leaving will discover the same applies in the jobs they are thinking of moving to
And therein lies Manning's best hope - that people still in will hear stories of leavers getting hacked off on the outside, and deciding that maybe the Flying Circus isn't so bad after all.
Reminds me of an entry in the diary of a senior Luftwaffe staff officer when the going was getting really tough for the Germans, who wrote "Our only hope is that the General Staff of the enemy air force is as scatter-brained as ours!".
Scatter-brained may have been a euphemism, perhaps equally applicable to Manning in the modern situation...