Military bases, especially in the austere / remote environments where some of them are, have a few differences from most civilian areas.
- Specialized personnel, who are required to fulfill the base's mission
- Substantial logistical costs for additional personnel or materiel
- Limited medical facilities, often lacking in higher standards of care, supplies, and with substantial evacuation distances
Since Diego Garcia is a major airbase, some of these are lessened, but they still all apply.
If someone is injured, they have to be rotated out and someone with the same specialized training rotated in. If something is needed (say, medical supplies), they have to be flown or shipped thousands of miles.
Each doctor/nurse/piece of medical equipment thus has a logistics footprint several times what a mainland one would. Which means a bare minimum medical presence.
Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.
Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.
At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(
> Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.
> Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.
> At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(
I wouldn't be surprised if the risk of shark attack to surfers there is lower than the risk of death due to basically every other activity on the base. There are maybe a dozen deaths (not just including surfers) due to sharks each year in the whole world. Banning surfing due to the risk of shark attack is totally illogical. Surfers are so much more likely to injure themselves or die in any number of other ways surfing. The risk of shark attacks just doesn't even enter the conversation.
I'd be interested to hear the reasoning on the ban. If it really is due to shark attacks, the military might consider getting someone more rational to make those decisions at the base.
I mean, even the article suggests that if the military reversed course and allowed surfing, there may not be as many people jumping at the opportunity as OP suggests. It says that military personnel have smuggled surfboards and failed to get many other folk interested in joining them over the course of a whole year:
>Somehow, he’d managed to smuggle his 8’6 pintail out there (we’d find this tricky to believe were it not for the images featured in the original article above) and he spent his year finding fun down the line tubes to jam it into. Unfortunately for Tom, he wasn’t able to coax many mates out into the lineup to join him, largely due to the abundance of hazards that lurk between the fast-breaking waves and the shallow coral reefs, including an array of hungry sharks, sting-rays, and stonefish. And of course, the the limited medical facilities on land should you come to blows with any of them.
And just because something's "in paradise" doesn't mean there's plenty to do, and simply suggesting a sport that not everyone's into doesn't really support that assertion. Paradise can be quite uneventful, even if it's still paradise.
Best case? Non-judicial punishment of some sort, e.g. "captain's mast" or the like. Forfeiture of pay, additional duty, minor imprisonment, changes to your rations, etc.
In a highly secured, remote base it's totally possible you get court-martialed, busted down in rank (aka losing out in monthly pay and bennies), or even catch a bad conduct discharge or something.
What percentage of Navy enlisted in the lower E-numbers have ever surfed, at all, in their whole lives? Reads like this would be a pretty shitty place to learn, so I can see why people'd balk at the notion, even without the risk of punishment.
- Specialized personnel, who are required to fulfill the base's mission
- Substantial logistical costs for additional personnel or materiel
- Limited medical facilities, often lacking in higher standards of care, supplies, and with substantial evacuation distances
Since Diego Garcia is a major airbase, some of these are lessened, but they still all apply.
If someone is injured, they have to be rotated out and someone with the same specialized training rotated in. If something is needed (say, medical supplies), they have to be flown or shipped thousands of miles.
Each doctor/nurse/piece of medical equipment thus has a logistics footprint several times what a mainland one would. Which means a bare minimum medical presence.
Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.
Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.
At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(