It amazes the quantity of resources that will sometimes be deployed to rescue a sole man (or a handful) lost at sea. Not to say this is a bad thing; I would certainly appreciate it if I were lost at sea. But it might be questionable to a pure utilitarian.
I counted at least one plane, two ships, and a helicopter all being diverted for the rescue. That's a great deal of expense in terms of fuel, I assume hundreds of crew, and lost time in whatever they were supposed to be doing.
One might argue that the pilot himself is a valuable resource to the military (cost of training plus his experience, fighter pilots aren't cheap) but there are similar rescues of civilians every once in a while.
My childhood best friend went into the Army to be a Ranger. He once told me that there is basically no higher priority event than a search and rescue mission. Down to a man, if you are captured, or at risk of capture, special forces and black hawks get called in with the ability to use any means necessary to get you out of there alive. He said it was an extreme source of pride for him personally to see how far they went to save their men on the ground and that this policy empowered you to fight harder and more confidently knowing that the full force of the US military was behind you (ie "no soldier left behind")
While I am no expert on these things, a few of the videos / articles / images I've seen of Russians fighters in Ukraine lead me to believe they don't feel this similar level of support from their armed forces, which could be contributing adversely to the outcome (from their perspective).
See, e.g., the unbelievable heroics — and losses — in rescuing a shot-down American flier during (what we call) the Vietnam war, including a Navy SEAL who was awarded* the Medal of Honor for his astonishing feats in finally getting the guy out more than ten days after he was downed.
* For those who don't know: Recipients of medals for valor in combat (I'm not a member of that august group) don't like it when people say they "won" the medals, because all too often some of their friends died in the engagement; the preferred usage is that someone "received" or "was awarded" the medal in question.
Sounds like there was something at play besides pure camaraderie and no-man-left-behind ethos:
> Hambleton had Top Secret access to Strategic Air Command operations and was an expert in surface-to-air missile countermeasures. The North Vietnamese Army may have possessed information about his presence in Vietnam and his capture would have meant a huge intelligence bonanza for the Soviet Union.
>a few of the videos / articles / images I've seen of Russians fighters in Ukraine lead me to believe they don't feel this similar level of support from their armed forces,
I'd mostly agree with the russian opinion (from what I've seen), but i certaily haven't seen it regarding the Ukranians. r/combatfootage r/ukkranianwarvideoreport etc.. Quite the opposite. I'd guess being trained by the us and uk has had an effect.
As an aside, whenever ukraine forces pass, they always wave to each other.
On top of the morale reasons that lots of people mentioned, the opportunity cost isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds. Pilots need a certain # of hours every year. If the option is "spend 40 hours this month doing training exercises" vs "spend 40 hours saving a pilot", the utilitarian argument becomes a bit weaker. Especially if search & rescue is part of their regular duties.
Similar for sailors. They get paid the same whether they're rescuing someone or drawing figure-8s in the middle of the ocean.
I’d say this is actually when you see the true purpose of a military shine: protect its people. It doesn’t matter how much it costs. This is real love and sacrifice right here.
I read that and although I’m not American, I felt very patriotic. What a great attitude and effort all the people involved brought.
I read it differently. I think it’s a tradeoff: they know that if they don’t do that sort of expenditure, troop morale will go down and they will have a less effective group anyway. So they take the lesser hit.
I think in practice there is no 'they' where some sort of single bean-counter trade-off decision is made to compute an abstract utility function that weighs troop morale against expenditure.
More realistically, it's a human decision making process where everyone quickly aligns to do whatever it takes to rescue the downed pilot. I've seen first hand how US military members think in real life situations like this. Everyone acts without a hint of self-interest around the clock until they have exhausted all options.
In fairness, it helps that it's the US military and money is typically of no concern in operational settings. :-)
In the civilian cases, there may be large economic benefits to the way people behave when they expect rescue if something goes wrong, even if very few particular rescues make economic sense per se.
There's likely a similar argument to made for the military, but involving morale and willingness to take personal risks in emergencies or times of war. Esprit de Corps and all that.
These both in addition to all other arguments in favor of such rescues.
> There's likely a similar argument to made for the military, but involving morale and willingness to take personal risks in emergencies or times of war. Esprit de Corps and all that.
Yup. But it's not a conscious calculation; more like a primal urge (or so I'm told, by people like my dad, who had first-hand experience fighting in the Korean War).
Oh, I'm sure it is, probably pretty far up the command structure, and even all the way to the top, depending on the people involved, let alone for those close to the action. But even the bean-counters may not question it or try to curb the practice, no matter how cold-hearted they may be, because it may in fact be a good use of money.
This reminds me of the articles attempting to calculate how much we've spent fictionally bringing Matt Damon back from places [1] and a line from the end of The Martian: "But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true."
From a utilitarian standpoint my guess is that the payoff is confidence.
Every sailor on those ships watched them send everything they had to rescue the pilot. Every one of them repeats this story. And every kid/new recruit hears it. My guess is that it instills a sense of safety where there isn't any.
I certainly feel safer traveling abroad knowing the lengths America generally goes to rescue its own.
> From a utilitarian standpoint my guess is that the payoff is confidence.
That's definitely part of the rational behind the more general duty to provide assistance at sea:
"A master or individual in charge of a vessel shall render assistance to any individual found at sea in danger of being lost, so far as the master or individual in charge can do so without serious danger to the master’s or individual’s vessel or individuals on board."
"It is hard to hang a man for stealing a sheep", he said. But the judge replied that we are not hanging you for stealing a sheep. We hang you so that other people would not steal sheep.
In the same way, we spend resources to save one drowning man, not so much to save that one man, but to let all seafaring men to know that if need be, we will do our best to save them.
Especially when you consider the tertiary effects of greater widespread daily peace of mind and social morale, two things that tend to spill over positively into all areas of life and to non-obvious beneficiaries.
The "pure utilitarian" viewpoint never made much sense to me because it seems to usually imply accounting for only first order effects, when calculating some costs and gains, and stopping there. I think the secondary effects of not saving people might go far beyond some saved fuel and time in such situations (especially in war, as some have mentioned here).
In other words, optimizing some aspects of a very complex and well functioning system, such as society, locally is likely to mess things up globally.
It's foolish for the pure utilitarian to leave the human factor out of the equation. Or perhaps his error is to consider dollars to be the ultimate commodity. Really, we as humans work for a much more valuable commodity than money. The fighting of the war in the first place is a human attempt at creating a good story (of a country that actually realizes peace and prosperity). The saving of one man (whether soldier or civilian) is yet another attempt at such a story. It's the human way.
Everyone in this thread has made good points and I don't disagree with any of them. Nor would I advocate to change policies here. My comment was really a surface level reaction to the number of resources deployed that I wouldn't expect to see living in the city for example. I almost deleted the comment right after posting but it was already generating discussion so I thought I'd leave it.
> Or perhaps his error is to consider dollars to be the ultimate commodity.
I was thinking (from a utilitarian perspective) about where those dollars could have been deployed to have a larger human benefit. Ie if the operation cost $500k (I really don't have good numbers on this but two military ships + the aircraft are not cheap) how else could you use that $500k to help people in need.
I liked your original comment, not because I agreed or disagreed with the utilitarian angle, but because it raised the most interesting emotional aspect of this story. Thanks for making it.
A) Legend has it that the last bow-tie-wearing nerd to question this policy slipped and fell overboard, or was maybe left for dead in the parking lot of some fisherman's dive bar in a quaint New England town. Nobody really knows for sure, because HIPAA, I think.
B) nobody in any decision-making-slash-accountability chain dares approach it that way, not only because they don't want to be knifed to death behind an AutoZone, but precedent goes back to, I dunno exactly, but I'll be bold and say "the dawn of seafaring", or maybe "whenever international maritime law was written down". (It ends up finding its way into "render assistance" clauses in some motor vehicle codes, by way of Rich People Horseless Carriage Sunday Driving Clubs and their Gentlemanly Codes of Honour or whatever - notably, predating Good Samaritan, IIRC.)
C) Most "diverted" resources probably aren't really doing anything of importance anyway, and people dying takes precedence over, say, taking pictures of the water or how sparkly the ozone layer is. Also, there's a good chance it's <training>.
There's usually a high degree of parallelism during the Search phase, as only the irrelevant half of the math works out on the fuel/time efficiency of, say, 1 aircraft vs 100 to fly a grid when the guy is (e.g.) clinging to a liferaft rope with broken arms, legs, back, and pelvis in 5' seas. The other 98 can go home (or the circles they were flying before) when Search is solved for and Rescue begins.
D) it's free training, almost certainly more interesting-slash-valuable than whatever was planned, and much higher fidelity than any simulation - PLUS! all of the inadequate planning, mixed messaging, nose-picking, dick-measuring, wrong radio channel-ing, confusion, ignorance, broken equipment, and general chaos of dealing with actual people in real life! ("practice how you perform/you perform how you practice")
As the OP demonstrates, there's often only a moment or two between your shitbox (built by the lowest bidder) catching on fire, and the need to flawlessly execute and context-switch through multiple checklists, with only your non-dominant hand, flight gloves, and your backup pocket knife, else everything explodes and everybody dies, The End.
The Navy sends ships out to sea during hurricanes, both because it's safer than smashing against docks, and “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor". Also, there are some interesting anecdotes about building lazy or incorrect muscle memory, or people panicking and reverting to classroom-style behavior (like cleaning up and organizing tools) when they feel they've reached The End of their Scenario, as it were. Contrary to popular myth, most people get dumber and forget the most basic of things under pressure, rather than Rising To The Occasion and, classically, lifting a car off of a baby.
So, I suppose all of this is to say that one should probably also amortize the (extraordinary) cost of things like this over the value of things like "a competent Navy", "proficient aeromedical crews", "Marines that can count AND do things with their hands", "being able to insert a trauma surgeon (or explosives) basically anywhere in the world inside of a few hours", and so on.
As an old partner of mine would sing while chugging preworkout, checking equipment, and getting psyched for the day:
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow //
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime //
You better
(Or, if you prefer the Latin: Haec Facimus, Ut Alii Vivant, Ut Ceteri Vivant, Etc.)
I counted at least one plane, two ships, and a helicopter all being diverted for the rescue. That's a great deal of expense in terms of fuel, I assume hundreds of crew, and lost time in whatever they were supposed to be doing.
One might argue that the pilot himself is a valuable resource to the military (cost of training plus his experience, fighter pilots aren't cheap) but there are similar rescues of civilians every once in a while.