Salute!
The tooth-to-tail ratio is a player, but I don't know how we can easily remedy that.
I always felt and still do that we have too many generals. Full colonels? About right for their jobs as wing or group commanders and such. In any case, that ain't the problem.
Besides the constant, never-ending war in the sandbox, there's the stuff that we always had to do besides fly and learn more about flying and practicing/training. In other words, we could have had a few generations of technicians like warrant officers and they would fly and fight. OTOH, we also needed senior officers and leaders that had touched the elephant and had the respect needed to wage war.
Seems to me that there's a happy medium with basic pilots and navigators and EWO's and so forth that are not ever gonna be generals. Then we should have a share of slots filled by the "professional" officers that will eventually command thousands or manage programs worth billions.
I repeat my mantra that the biggest thing with retention today is not $$$$. I saw it in the early 70's in the fighter community with many friends bailing out because the Vietnam scenario was not going away, and the airlines were hiring due to all the WW2 and Korean pilots retiring.
The 16 years we Yanks have spent in the sandbox has no end in sight. We haven't lost as many folks as we did from 1961 to 1973, but the smaller force is deploying a lot more. In 'nam we would go bout every 2 or 3 years, as we had a daisy chain system that used "return dates" and such.
Gums opines...