Originally Posted by
Bell_ringer
Good perspectives. Thank you.
Ships have been scuttled since the dawn of time, and when you’re burning up to $2B per day, ageing aircraft are small change when faced with the consequences of losing an airman to the enemy.
My father (born 1928) and I used to marvel at the fuss in the Australian media for every individual Australian casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan after the wholesale and anonymous slaughter of his father's generation, and of WWII in his childhood and of Vietnam in my childhood.
To be clear; they didn't go into this rescue planning to lose $300 million of equipment, and a high level of dedication to rescueing stranded personel clearly has great value for morale and future recruiting, but what exactly do you see as "the consequences of losing an <single> airman to the enemy"??
Because this is war, and deaths will happen, and if even just one is intolerable then you have no business taking part in war.
If losing a single American combatant is worse than $300 million in lost equipment, then a ground war is going to prove prohibitively expensive to America. Challenging as it may be, you can put a dollar value on a life, or even a period as a POW, and $300 million could save a lot of American lives, whether civilians through better healthcare or road safety or OH&S, etc, or military through better equipment, training, technology, etc.