It worked well for us in NZ. Whilst working at Ohakea or Whenuapei working for Airways, we had the opportunity to continue in uniform in the Terrirorials. All the bases were civil units. When the RNZAF required ATC support they had a pool of controllers to use. I believe it is still being used there although the deployment requirements have been reduced without the Air Attack Force.
A core element of RAAF controllers can be maintained for deployments and a consolidation of the ATC services with ASA would possibly alleviate some of the manning issues.
I believe however that the military requirement or need for ATC services has always been over emphasized in Australia compared to a lot of other countries.
In this region for example (where most of the wars are!) all the military assets departing, arriving and en-route spend 80-90%% of their sortie in civil airspace under civil control getting to and from theatre, so the core "element" that we were talking about above would be ideal to look after the 10-20% of in theatre operations. All aspects of "the package" are dealt with by civvy controllers here on a daily basis and every combination of assets from Global Hawks to F15's/F16's/A10'sKC135 and any other variation on the theme whether conducting tanking, maritime patrols and RV's are integrated amongst the day to day civil traffic. This integration has been afforded little or no liason and under the circumstances has worked reasonably well, the peak of Afghanistan was probably the worst for all concerned and this could have been better disciplined had military controllers and airspace planners been more directly involved with civil agencies.
It is not essential to be in uniform to be able to effectively control military assets on a daily basis in a domestic environment and this has been proven for decades in New Zealand and many other countries. Move those assets into a hostile environment however, you will definately need specialized operatives to deal with all the military aspects of in theatre operations and the associated risks. The core deployable element that is maintained by the RAAF can serve this purpose whilst the Defence Civilians/Civilians maintain core funtions back in country.
