Ken,

As I think you know, I spent several years in the CSAR community. There is a lot of speculation about the HH-47 pick because, frankly, most CSAR folks much prefer either the 92 or the 101. There are some legitimate advantages to the 47, of course, but the same can be said for the other airframes and the 47 comes with some significant CSAR-specific disadvantages. Anyway, the speculation is that the 47 was picked with the intent to simply roll the CSAR mission into AFSOC's ball of wax as simply another mission in the AFSOC set. As you probably know, CSAR WAS tranferred, briefly, from ACC to AFSOC. The AFSOC people were 100% for the 47 and most of their excitement seemed to come from all the missions those aircraft could perform that weren't CSAR. Again, that is simply the perception of a lot of people in the CSAR community. They don't want to see their CSAR skillset diluted too much with other tasks, which isn't an unreasonable fear, IMO, given the OPTEMPO of AFSOC and the other SoF components.

As for the CSAR assets picking up Medevacs and lost SOF troopies, why not? You've got a capable bird with trained crews as you point out and other, equally capable birds and crews are (one would hope) doing other mundane haulage things and it makes little sense to let that CSAR cape just sit.
I agree completely and the CSAR folks do too, for the most part - the units in theater are pretty aggressive about advertising their capabilities and very rarely turn down a potential mission. Birds were OPCON'd to the land component to assist their efforts. For the most part, the HH-60's are used on those missions that are too risky for others, which makes sense.

As I know you know, there are also a few pilots picked with non CSAR assets here and there. LINK, LINK. I think we're all on the same side...
Agree totally there too. My main point in all this is simply to suggest the DoD needs a dedicated personnel recovery capability, and currently USAF CSAR is the only force that meets that requirement. I worry that Sec. Gates and others see PR as a secondary mission that does not require a dedicated force. If true, I think that's a mistake. That has been tried before and didn't work out too well in many cases (like the Navy in Vietnam, for example).