One reason the USN traditionally has been so confident is that the Navy is structured to lose a few carriers and keep fighting. Bad things are going to happen--especially as the Navy projects its power into the territorial waters of foreign nations. Enemy diesel subs have the advantage of waiting for noisier US nuke boats and surface fleets to come to them. This gives the defending diesel boats a significant advantage, which may be something the Australian skipper in question exploited.
On the plus side, results like an Australian diesel boat getting one or more fish into the hull of a USN carrier gives spectacular feedback. We should want our allies, with their generally more limited means, to show us up from time to time. Better a notional Aussie fish than a real Chinese, Russian, or other potential enemy fish.
As I see it, the problem with getting one's fourth point of contact handed to one in a training exercise is that those who were taken to the mat spend more energy defending their pride than learning the appropriate lessons. When I was active duty, my brigade got waxed at NTC. Almost everyone does. Rather than discuss what we could do to improve ourselves, the officers hung out and b*****d about all the unfair advantages the OPFOR enjoyed. When all of those advantages were added up, how could we be expected to anything but get our tails kicked? Since the result was virtually pre-determined, the best thing to do was to hunker down, fold our arms across our chests, and show contempt for the whole process.
My JRTC experience was the same. We learned nothing except how to generate excuses to save our pride. Had we not been thoroughly destroyed in most of our encounters, we might actually have applied some analysis and learned something useful. Instead, we learned that a rotation to JRTC sucks and nothing can be done about it. Worse, the whole experienced subjected the leadership to serious embarrassment. Leaders made to look like fools take strong steps to demonstrate to their troops that said leaders are still in charge. I believe this is called backlash. The heroes of the exercise (often rather junior leaders and individual soldiers) are the villains of the organization after the After Action Review is complete.
Of course, it all goes back to command climate. If the battalion commander is the sort who can take a blow his pride publicly and with professionalism, the company commanders and staff are likely to follow suit. If the battalion commander is crapping himself because his rapid ascension to full bull has just come to a screaming halt, there will be a lot more finger-pointing and denials. Sadly, I've served under a lot more of the latter than the former.
Webstral
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