CM,
Desk officers are posted there and are generally trying to do the best they can with what they have.
If I were being charitable I would say that was the problem - an organisation pared right down such that it is now unable to offer any sort of decent career management unless you happen, as Evalu8ter suggested, to be a high flyer who's path needs managing. Unfortunately, I have been on the receiving end of pretty shoddy service from Manning for most of my career, and certainly well before the recent bout of slash and burn, so I'm not convinced that recent cuts are anything more than an excuse.
I can't come up with any other explanation why an organisation would flout its own published policy on postgrad qualifications and aditional seniority (the old white PAM Air booklets that had the seniority charts in) and retrospectively remove seniority once an individual was in service because they didn't think the qualification was relevant (MSc in Meteorology - I'll leave you to mull over that one, but OC PMS' response at the time was "it's Manning, unfortunately they can do what they like"). And I think it was only after challenging the Desk Officer's interpretation of my file that I then jumped in excess of 100 places on the promotion boards in a year. His interpretation included, amongst other things, an inability to work out how long I had been in my first 2 posts despite having all the OJARs to hand. Did I really improve that much in 12 months, or did someone actually read my file properly for the first time in 12 months - he hadn't looked past the profile sheet before the career 'interview'!
I know the majority of people don't wake up in the morning determined to do a bad job, and will include Manning in that statement. But I suspect I am far from unusual in my experiences, and unless you are in the top 1-2% having their career actively and carefully managed, it can seem very hard to not to think that the motto of 'Putting bums on seats since 1918' isn't an apt one. And with morale as fragile as it currently is, that isn't a good situation for the career managers to find themselves in.