Perhaps one of the reasons RAF techs aren’t keen to get involved with other people's kit is that their experience levels have been eroded over the years by contractorisation - There was a time when the RAF was responsible for entire comms networks, hardware, software etc. It was easy enough to get the JT on a remote site to reset something or put a monitor on the cct. Now its all down to Cogent, Fujitsu etc the RAF lads might not even be able to access hubs and routers!
The level of co-operation from the civvies is buried in contracts and performance schedules - you get exactly what you pay for - anything else is an extra.
It costs money and time to produce good techs and their knowledge has to be continually updated. Problem with that is treating fully trained specialists in a buoyant job market like sh!t means they leave in droves. So we contractorise, which in the short-term saves a few quid and we don't have to address the problem of how we treat our specialists - in the medium to long term we get shafted over the maintenance contracts and lose 'corporate knowledge'