I thought about this, and came to the conclusion that the coastguard and especially military see it as a good opportunity to test their equipment and procedures for real.

And seafarers have a strong code of ethics about helping other seafarers.

As long as they aren't brown.

Budgets are unfortunately a zero sum game, and I have to wonder if there are much more obvious ways to save lives more efficiently with the amount of money it’s costing the US government to undertake a massive and technically complex search for 5 people.

If you're going to go down that route, please direct it at the cost of the US military's unfathomably high spending.

There's capital and then operational costs.

If a Coast Guard ship heads out of St. John's or a Navy aircraft/ship/submarine transits to the area, they burn fuel but already existed with all their trained personnel.

So most of the cost is moving things into position. Expensive, but the asset probably would have been moving somewhere anyway.

Whilst I agree, and I hope the vessel had adequate insurance for such an eventuality, it's a excellent "training" exercise.

Real world scenarios which don't involve any enemy combatants are invaluable to keep everyone at peak readiness

It's also a little annoying to hear their lead adviser, David Concannon, complain about government moving too slowly: https://youtu.be/nW3r01_ZWmY

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/oceangate-...

He's representing a company that took safety shortcuts because government regulations slow innovation, but is also complaining that the government isn't helping them quickly enough in this search.

He thanks the governments, but says they need to move faster. As an adviser, he should be telling this company to have a better emergency plan.