this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Have to disagree, this was valuable and real world training experience for military and coast guard resources that would otherwise be running simulation rescues anyway. The gear and people both need to be trained and maintained to be functional, let alone effective, in a real crisis. These are the a similar set of resources (people, machines, systems, etc.) that would be deployed for a fishing boat that sank, or a plane that went down in that area. That Malaysia Airlines flight several years back is an example of international military resources being deployed similarly.
While I agree the military budget is bloated in many ways, this isn't one of the areas where it makes sense to call it favoritism or greed when the same resources deployed to assist in searching for the OceanGate sub would not have been able to be deployed into the Mediterranean. There's no overlap there, and while money and resources would be of a great help that would not have been instead of the OceanGate search, but rather in addition to it.
Actually, now that I think about it - is the US military or coast guard even authorized to operate in the Mediterranean? Looks like we have some operating agreements and exercises with Malta but I'm not seeing a lot of readily available hardware that gets deployed there. You're certainly not getting any large scale hardware (cutters, subs, deployment platforms) into the Mediterranean in short order.
Overall seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how S&R works on a global scale.
Also, people are vastly underestimating how slow boats are. A boat large enough to be useful for search and rescue can only move at like 30 mph, tops. The wreck of the Titanic is only a few hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland; reason it took so long to find the sub debris field is because the boat carrying a submersible capable of diving to those depths only just arrived on the scene this morning-- four days after the search began.
No way any boats stationed on the east coast of the US could have made it to the Medditeranean in time to be helpful in the search for the drowned migrants, and vice versa.
That is exactly right. This wasn't about saving them, but is an invaluable exercise that can't be replicated by a tabletop or full scale exercise. Agencies were probably jumping at the chance to get involved.
All this while I was thinking the billionaires are going to die because search and rescue operations in any state experiencing a period of fascism are more focused on pushing boats back out to sea.
Not doing actual rescues, that would build experience, test out gear, and maybe even invent new contraptions for future rescues.
Karma, if you like.
We get it.
You want to be edgy because you can't imagine how the resources spent and trained in a submarine rescue operation are completely different than the ones that would be useful in a surface ship rescue operation. Nor how resources stationed for North Atlantic operations wouldn't be able to reach the Mediterranean anywhere soon enough.
Or how "pushing boats back out" would be coastal work and that has virtually zero relation to open sea.
But you enjoyed watching these humans die because they're billionaires instead of refugees. You don't care about human life, you just care about political point scoring.
I can't imagine that they are, at least, not without first co-ordinating and clearing it with local authorities, and if a country suddenly did that without warning, I can't imagine that the reception (or the imagery) would be particularly positive.
Imagine being Malta, and suddenly the US is beelining a bunch of military hardware your way with neither announcement nor warning. That would probably set off all sorts of warnings.
Aside from territorial waters, you don't need authorization to operate in the ocean. It's international waters.
There are international agreements to cover maritime search-and-rescue in certain areas, so that (most of the time) two countries don't just point their fingers at each other and say "this one is your problem", but it's not as if you're not allowed to rescue someone in an area that someone else is responsible for rescuing people in.
A military training exercise would be much smaller in scope, coordinated to manage costs, and done at a time that was convenient. It also wouldn't include private vessels.
There were private vessels and ROVs involved. The debris field was found by the Horizon Arctic, a private vessel that services oil rig deep sea anchors. Who is paying that private ship? We are. They certainly wouldn't be part of a training exercise.