I think red tape accurately and succinctly communicates the situation you describe especially given that in a prior version you yourself wrote Attempts to rectify this situation working through official channels did not work which it seems to me is the very essence of extreme red tape If you like we can say instead official indifference or unresponsiveness but I don t see how that better informs the reader I also don t see how your wording makes the point you mention re success in decrypting and the importance of that success Obviously a request for more resources will try to convince the recipient that such will help the writers to better do what they ve been tasked to do To spell out that their desire was to achieve the productivity that was possible would be completely superflous of course that was the goal And surely no reader needs to be told that better productivity faster decrypting etc meant the entire difference between valuable intelligence and useless retrospective Your wording doesn t mention any of that stuff anyway Further as I ve said before I also don t see why it matters what specific type of resource was lacking the important points are a the codebreakers felt that they could not do the best job possible without more resources b Churchill unhesitatingly granted them carte blanche showing the importance he attached to their work and the breadth of his authority in making such decisions What doesn t matter is just what it was that was lacking typists paperclips light bulbs Some of these elements could be incorporated to enliven the narrative e g some kind of for want of a nail type angle Look Prime Minister you ve gathered all these first class minds here but we can t get anything done because we have to do our own bloody TYPING if sources lay something like that out Am I missing something P S What do you mean about WP CIV