You just described the last eight years or so of my life. Layoffs survived, layoffs not survived, and about 20 VP's who still, apparently, haven't been revealed for the idiots they are as they're off ruining other companies. Where I was, the big word was "reorganization," which everyone came to know meant layoffs. There was always some vague justification for it, but when you're reorganizing every six months, you're not giving the any organization a chance to succeed. All you're doing is perpetuating chaos.
Then they wonder why morale sucks.
Here is an interesting story. One time I and one of my colleagues who were working a temporary gig at a research organization (so they said they were) took it upon ourselves on our own time to develop of model of how this so-called business worked. We came up with equations that described the revenue generation, cash flow, costs, etc. Then we started taking partial derivatives to identify the singularities, were the "sources" and "sinks" were, in essence. We had heard of other people who had done this in other venues and wanted to try it ourselves. Well, surprise surprise, almost all of the revenue sinks were at the VP administration line, the sources were somewhat diffuse and distributed among line managers and applications employees (those were the people actually bringing in money). We showed it to our manager (who was an okay guy) and he got a kick out of it. I have no idea if that model ever made it beyond the midline management level because we were both moving on to other work (to be young and foot loose and fancy free again!), but I have a feeling if it did, whomever paid attention to it would probably get the gate.