ABSTRACT
CNN has just announced a breaking story. A fighter aircraft has gone down over water, and the pilot failed to eject. Nothing has been recovered, no plane, no crew, no sign of anything. The headline story mentions the price tag on the multi-million dollar aircraft, relays the statistics of the casualty count, and pinpoints the location on an ironically cheerful map. We all feel informed and sorry, shake our heads at the price paid in taxpayer dollars, yet feel no connection since this story has no bearing on our lives. We have heard it before, military training accidents happen as a consequence of maintaining combat readiness, and the public has become almost numb to these losses.
