Whilst I share the view that it's sad to see any decline in military activity, let's face the fact that commercially-operated SAR is not new, as several others have pointed out in this thread. If you look at it simply in terms of the number of bases, civil helicopters currently provide one third of UK SAR cover and have done for many years, whilst the RAF provides half. If civil operators were incapable of providing an effective service I think we'd have heard about it by now.