The British Navy snapped up so many of the good personnel

Circa WWI:

Before the War Office had awoken to the demands of modern war, the Admiralty had. Put in its orders, protected its workers from conscription and claimed a large share of national steel production.  Of the 480,000 protected industrial workers in July 1915, 400,000 belonged to the Admiralty, which controlled three-quarters of the maritime industrial labor force and virtually all its skilled men.  The Ministry of Munitions never succeeded in laying claim to any of them and had to rely heavily on unskilled women throughout the war…This generated much resentment among less fortunate, or less provident, ministries and ministers.

That is from the truly excellent The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945, by N.A.M. Rodger.  Reading Rodger you get a sense of how frequently and how well he thinks about “how institutions actually work,” and how rarely so many other historians actually do that.