I agree with you that historically there may not have been a need for dedicated search and rescue assets, but the Arctic is changing very quickly. My colleague David Barber at the University of Manitoba, Canada's leading sea ice scientist, is now predicting a total melt-out of all the Arctic sea ice as early as 2013. We're already seeing 150 cruise ships in Baffin Bay each summer. The amount of activity is increasing at a huge rate.
Yes, David Barber might be wrong, and maybe the ice won't disappear so quickly, but search and rescue, like all issues of national defence, requires planning for the worst-case scenario rather than the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario, I'd like to suggest, is pretty serious indeed.