Jungly
Can't disagree with you over the pound being king.
There's probably a culture of legacy thinking here (of which I'm still guilty). Whereby people are used to a very high standard of SAR and presume that's the base level required. In reality as I said above, any service is better than none, and if the jobs are attacked safely and
most casualities are dealt with then
that is the base level.
However.....if we paired everything down to the leanest possible it would make for a dull existence, grossly limit the respite tours for those overworked Front Liners and I suspect would rather take the shine off the military flying machine in that we do SAR pretty well and there are tangible benefits to MOD associated with it. Viewed purely as a
PR effort it is indeed expensive but it has other roles than SAR - namely civil aid, homeland defence, nuclear accident support (deep joy!) etc. All stuff that might prove a bit geographically tricky for the SH mates if they're all deployed East of Suez and certainly not going to be in any MCA/civvy company contract.
A subjective view of course, you can always get choppers from somewhere to fill the gaps.
SB