To be honest shiney scot, the whole aspect of branch and trade configuration should be explained, as well as our future role and direction. With the paper that identified the 316 posts to go, I made a natural assumption that it would broadly mirror the redundancy fields. So I was surprised to see no cpl or sgt posts in the mix. I appreciate the sponsors and manners believe that it will all from natural wastage, but that does seem to be quite a large assumption to make.
With the FS and WO posts that will go, I have heard that it is a fishing trip to see how many apply and they will take that number, with no compulsory's, in order to open up some promotion flow. Like you I struggle to see how the trade will be configured with the loss of so many and a significant portion of experience.
Whist many will twitter on about the officer posts, 120 is still a very significant number, and if not managed very carefully will lead to a branch that is not balanced, and therefore open to risk and credibility failure. To be honest our future stock rests with the individual's that go into the posts that advise our aircrew masters; to have inexperienced personnel in these posts will be branch suicide. When that happens the trade will suffer massively as well.
As I have mentioned previously, careful management is required with transparency at the helm of that. Good communication is vital, if not then our people will not respond in the manner they want!