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111deregulate wherever we could and thus pass authority further down thecommand chain.A particular area that we are looking at is the relationship betweenjunior officers and NCOs. Many of our warrant officers and SNCOs feelthat they lack sufficient authority and we are looking to see whether itwould be possible to cascade even further down the line, perhaps byreplacing some junior officer posts with warrant officers or SNCOs.Unfortunately, this is not quite as straightforward as it seems, because, insome of our Branches, there are barely sufficient good junior officerappointments to breed the next generation of squadron leaders and wingcommanders; if we give some of them to SNCOs we could well giveourselves another headache in a few years time.So, from my perspective, devolution is something that works verywell when we are operating in the field and actually doing the job,although it can still cause frustration when we are back at base. Wecontinue to work at it, but we are probably not quite there yet. PerhapsTony Stables has another view?AVM Tony Stables. No, I haven%u2019t, but, in the context of SNCOs, Iwould offer an observation on the quality of my airmen aircrew. Theyhad originally enlisted as 18 or 19 year-old sergeants and I found that thequality of leadership was almost totally lacking. In fact, when we cameback to the UK I made two specific recommendations. The first was thatairmen aircrew should probably be employed as corporals to begin withand that they should be required to earn promotion to sergeant, and thesecond, that they should be subject to an annual assessment or appraisal,which they weren%u2019t in those days. The assessment aspect was takenforward but the idea of starting out as corporals was not implemented,and I can, of course, appreciate the difficulties that the recruiters wouldhave encountered in trying to sell the attractions of this option to thehighly educated group of young people that we seek to attract to serve asaircrew. Nevertheless, the limitations of some of my airmen aircrewwere very apparent. In fact, when we went ashore in the Falklands, theman I appointed to command the groundcrew element was the sergeantchef, because he had the most amazing qualities of leadership, far abovethose of my master aircrew, the warrant officers who worked for me. Itwas a very interesting lesson.Mike Meech. We heard that one of the lessons taught by the Falklands