We wasted resources trying to save a billionaire greed class oppressor while we let struggling brothers and sisters who would have been far easier to save drown by the dozens.
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.
U.S. Navy Heard What It Believed Was Titan Implosion Days Ago — The Wall Street Journal (apple.news)
Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy....