I quite agree that farming out SAR to a civvy entity (foreign or otherwise) is possibly a bit foolish and will certainly have the effect of taking yet more of the military out of the public eye but I don't think it'll affect the service offered. It's just a shame there will now be a profit motive and bottom line involved.
I would much rather see military SAR continue but the way things are these days there just isn't the money. It would be nice (fanciful) to see the military continue with in-house development of much smaller but "proper", dedicated CSAR assets to support combat operations as a result though.
At the risk of going off at a massive tangent, the RAF needs to realise that it isn't going to be putting 1000 bomber raids over Dresden or fleets of C-47s over Normandy ever again. It should be specialising a LOT more; smaller, well equipped fleets, doing specialist jobs well. Just look at the USAF SpecOps community and things like their Pedro flights. Everyone bemoans the shrinking Air Force -it's a fact of life that we/they are stuck with. The "thinkers" out there should be rationalising and rethinking to produce Force Elements that, although smaller, mange to punch well above their weight, technically and professionally.
The RAF I left a year ago (and still have some involvement with) had become one with a thin veneer of glossy brochures and the odd "C17 delivers thing" news story, covering an actual reality of poor serviceability, patchy training, low morale, navel gazing, delayed projects and a level of bureaucracy that the Indian Railways would envy.
Until someone instigates a proper Defence Review (not the money based horse**** of the last one) then bits of the military infrastructure, like SAR, will chipped away and bodged over, making the edifice creak ever louder.
Told you it was a massive tangent.
And I still think Stuffy is a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
