PA, using your argument lets
Contractorise all UK dedicated tasks
SAR
All military training
All second and third line servicing
MOD
UK Air Defence
And a host of others.
Then we could have the 21000 RAF as mentioned on another thread with a lot of very upset people unable to break the deployment cycle.
Of course a UK dedicated SAR asset hasn’t deployed on ops as it is er UK dedicated.
There is of course an example of SAR deploying subsequently when the host nation cannot provide the asset (FI).
The main skill of the SAR Asset is over water recovery at night, something that our dark blue cousins are more than capable of doing on deployed ops. SAR is not a secondary task for SH, CSAR is, which is a different ball game all together.
There is a lot of cross pollination between the deployable front line and SAR, both RAF and Navy, skills that would be lost in any future PFI.
Now where are those pigeons!!!!
R1a