And as none of the current military are contracted to do SAR but rather to be warfighters who do SAR until their next posting you cannot tupe them over.
That is certainly not correct - many RAF crews do more than just one quick 'rest tour' on SAR, many have over 10 years (some many more) experience. If you were to write their job spec it would read 'SAR Crew' - that is why the TUPE rules should have applied.
When you replace one service with another, under TUPE, you are required to offer the existing employees to transfer - that is completely different to allowing the new employer to select which employees they want.
Reality hurts, now get real, we can't afford to save everyone.
so what metric are you going to use to decide who lives and who dies? Surely the only answer is to try as best as is humanly possible to rescue everyone - that requires the best training possible to provide the best qualified and trained crews possible.
Does milSAR rescue everyone? No, but we try as hard as possible and train as hard as possible to make that our aspiration.