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.
Absolutely, and I don't have a problem with any of what you have said. The only problem being that by taking SAR out of the military, what you are essentially suggesting is that the military should concentrate on a small cadre of CSAR / JPR specialists if we want to maintain such a rescue capability. Whilst small specialist teams are great, and often have an output far in exccess of their size and theoretical capabilties, they are also horrendously expensive. And having been around when we validated the JPR capability on Merlins and almost the next day put it into abayance for lack of funding, I just don't see the RAF ever recapitalising its rescue capabilties in any meaningful and substantive way once SAR is gone. No JPR, no mil SAR, no Nimrod; God help us if we ever find we need to do more than rescue an overweight walker in flip flops from Ben Nevis.