Could it be that the RAF needs to pay those highly experienced people to actually stay in the RAF and not leave to get paid big bucks for some Middle Eastern country? My Uncle was in the RAF working on Nimrod and he was offered loads of money to go work in Saudi Arabia or somewhere in that area.
Nope, the people like myself who leave and go to Saudi/Qatar/Oman etc are usually those "workers" directly involved in operational flying (Aircrew, Engineer, Simulator Technicians etc) which is where Saudis/Qataris/Omanis etc need the most help and therefore the people who do that tend to be much lower in Rank than the "management" senior Officers above. So for example a pilot (say Flt Lt or Sqn Ldr) is only 1/3 of the way up the Officer promotion chain whereas the senior Officers are the top 1/3 and in my experience its true for the Engineers too, mostly SAC/CPL "workers" (bottom 1/3 of promotion chain) leave to go to the Middle East, rather than "management" FS/WO levels (top 1/3) - so pretty much it's the "workers" who go whilst the "management" generally tend to have found better jobs in the UK when they leave and don't need to go abroad for the extra money.
Looking at the excessive amount of Senior Officers mentioned above, some of them have jobs which make sense and I don't deny that some of these roles are very much needed, but on the other hand there are jobs like "Head of RAF Sport" for example, which apparently needs a person to be paid £115k+ per year (and a 50% pension on retirement), or Attachés to various embassies (again £115k+ per year again), or a single person paid £125k+ just to look after "RAF Scotland" with it's one, single air base and then there's "cross-over" roles where 7 Officers all have the same title i.e "Head of Training" etc.
The reason for this level of "over-Officering" is, and sadly it's a well established trope, that the only people who can create/manage the roles are the same ones who do them, rather than being managed by the MOD, so sometimes (not every-time TBH) they create roles to create extra places just for their low-rank work-mates to get promoted and fill, who then all get a lovely pay bump and a much better pension when they leave, and because its only senior Officers who create roles, its also only them who can cancel the role, which never happens, meaning the senior officer branch gets bigger and bigger every year whilst the number of people in the RAF gets lower. It's all very much "Jobs for the Boys" sadly.
As an example of this, every RAF base this year, which used to be managed by a single Group Captain (1 rank below "General") has now been split into two Group Captain roles - Infrastructure and Flying - so instantly we've created a dozen new Group Captain roles which now need to be filled by a whole bunch of extra Group Captains, all being paid around £95k-105k a year, and a percentage of these extra Group Captains will need to be promoted, meaning that extra Air Commodore (rank equivalent of "General") roles will need to be created for them to move into, creating even more £115k+ jobs which you, me and every other tax payer pays for at a time when the number of people in the RAF keeps dropping further and further - But the Senior Officers on their 6 figure wages and 50% pensions don't care about that, and they're the only ones who can reverse these decisions, and that'll never happen because they're "in on it" for want of a better term as, understandably for them, none would close their own position even if it could instead be combined with another.
Just to put our own bloated senior Officer corps into context - The Israeli Defence Force (Army/Air Force/Navy etc) is similar in size to the UK's Armed Forces (full time) at around 130k-150k people - It only uses 25 "General" rank senior Officers for those 140k people (
link). Or how about this, in WW2 the Army had just 362 Generals for over 2.5 Million Soldiers but now still has 210 Generals for just 78,000 Soldiers etc (yes its endemic through-out our whole military, the Navies just as bad too).
That's why i had them redone.
