This is always such a horse shit approach. Usually the attrition is the people you can least afford to lose, and the peopel that get paid well to make 'placemat summaries' or 'quicklook rollup tables' or whatever other executive info graphic BS flavour of the day just keep making up colourful lies that mean nothing because the underlying assumptions are void because there is no one left to do actual work.
Successive governments make incremental process additions at all levels, which takes more people to do the same work. If they want to reduce the public service requirements, don't require simple travel requests to get L2 approval, then additional approvals and triple audits, 24 approval gates for projects, etc.
Also, if they want to create big projects, those will need someone to do them. DND shrinking public servants means we just hire people back as contractors at 1.5-2 their SWE so we can actually just get things done, but those costs get hidden as 'project costs' like parts or build vice reported as staffing cost.
It's an expensive shell game that pisses me off as a taxpayer and someone that has to try and get things done despite the handicaps built into the system to impede actual progress. When something actually gets done it seems like it's almost a fluke that happened despite the 'business processes'.
Apparently this budget means we're getting a partial amount of what we requested for naval O&M increases to do the known work, but not all of it, and is being split with some other things, so best of luck to us I guess in maintaining a fleet. Hopefully someone has the intestinal fortitude to actually decommission a ship before spending north of half a billion dollars on a DWP to get it back up to commercially accepted safety standards for a godamn fishing boat.