Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.
Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.
Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge
ALT
In support of this, the US Navy seems to have known that the sub was lost almost immediately after it happened. Presumably “the sound was not definitive” because they wanted an excuse for a training exercise, but the fact that they used the location of the sound to narrow the search area somewhat reveals how little they were planning on finding anyone alive.
Locating the wreck based on implosion sounds recorded by underwater acoustic sensor networks and then investigating the seafloor with submersibles is the first thing they do.
(Military submarines consist of multiple independently sealable watertight compartments, it’s possible that on sinking some might see damaged ones implode and generate noise while others remain intact and survivable)
I feel like some of the schadenfreude towards these submarine guys comes from finally seeing a rich guy attempt to buy their way to a peak experience fail. You can hire an army of Sherpas to summit Everest, you can pay Musk to go to space, but you can’t vulgarly buy your way to the depths of the ocean.
“Vulgarly” is the key. How else would you do it? Train hard? Work your way up through the normal Abyss Corps? It’s definitionally a logistics challenge.
To which the “legitimate” approach of course is James Cameron, personally involved at the forefront of submersibles, as supported by multiple Oscar-winning and/or highest grossing in history movies specifically drawing on that interest. No one would begrudge him, but then again no one could see him going down on a sub piloted by Xbox controller.
My take on this missing submarine is it’s part of the thing where since Harambe the world operates on novelistic logic. Like, it’s not even that it’s poetic justice for these billionaires to die so much as that it’s a dramatic event arising from the confluence of several major themes of the contemporary world
ALT
ALT