I know Air Force people make a lot of effort to make do with what is available and that often the country seems ungrateful, but don't tell me that the Air Force is some well run and efficient organization that does what it is doing well, for that is far from the truth. You should face the truth and attempt to fix those problems instead of patting yourselves on the back and bragging about doing such a great job at running aircraft.
Nobody is saying that the RAF runs an efficient system, we all know that it isn't, if you class efficient as being able to use the aircaft in the air most of the time.
The problem between military operations and civilian operations is the tempo of operations. In the civilian world, you pretty much know that you are going to be able to fill the aircraft for each sector (because otherwise it wouldn't be cost effective). In the military, whilst we have some operations which have high utility (normally the surge phase and initial sustainment of an operation), the majority of the time the airlift required is for the "customer" wherever they are operating; that maybe a Red Flag in the US lasting 2 weeks, an army exercise in Africa lasting a month, Naval exercise of Gibraltar. None of these are regular tasks so we cannot set up a standing slip pattern. Customers want their freight when then need it, not 2 weeks later when the slip pattern allows it.
As has been said, we do run slip patterns when we can but this means that you have to have much more manpower than we currently have as a core requirement. What do those aircrew do when there isn't a surge on? They get bored, frustrated and walk! More importantly they lose the skills which are so important when conducting operations in a high threat environment because we do not have the required number of aircraft to conduct training on.
What we need are some more aircraft to increase the serviceability rate of the aircraft rather than trashing the ones we have and bring their replacement dates forward.
We cannot replace the aircraft when they become uneconomical to run because we do not have the revenue stream which civilian airlines have.
Civilian charter and schedule operations are a long way away from military charter and tactical operations and therefore they cannot be compared as apples against apples.