Fire the useless third
I spent many years as an RAF Officer. I worked with MOD civil servants extensively, as well as the blue suit lot. In fact, I probably managed more MOD civil servants than blue suits by the end of my career. There were a few things that were really obvious to me in my time:
1) The MOD civil service is horribly overstaffed and horribly inefficient. A large proportion of them are best at justifying their own existence, rather than actually doing something useful.
2) The armed forces haven't properly restructured for a mobile modern armed force, we are still largely in cold war mode. For example, most communications specialists in the RAF are deployed on fixed cold war sites, supporting cold war communications. Deployments are either handled by a single unit (Tactical Communications Wing), or are handled by temporary detachments from troops who aren't trained to do the deployed job.
3) Command staffs are horribly overweighted, largely in a vain effort to maintain the senior officer posts that Lewis is so damning about. It is far easier to maintain a Group Captain in a command post where he only 20 or 30 personnel to command, most of whom are officers. On a frontline unit, a Group Captain would command 1500 troops and 50 aircraft.
What the military needs is some hard decision making. Firstly, force the military to dispose of at least half of its officers from Major/Lt Cdr/Sqn Ldt up (preferably three quarters of them). They can all go from command jobs without affecting military efficiency an inch. Secondly, fire half of the civil service, and let front line units pick out what to keep and what to get rid of. Finally, use some of the spare cash to upgrade all equipment so it is deployable. This way when a squadron deploys from RAF Whatever, it can take its own Comms unit, its own suppliers, etc.
Will this happen - no. Why - basically because the senior officers want to protect their careers.