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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.

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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.

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