History has demonstrated time and again that those who discount their opponents in peacetime usually pay a heavy price in war.
Stilleto69, keep in mind that the Iragi military c1991 was not the Red Army c1986. Yes, they used a lot of similar equipment (although the Soviets usually didn't export their very best) and doctrine (much of which the Iraqi military misapplied), but to conclude that the US Army would have whipped the Red Army because Saddam got spanked is like arguing that North Vietnam would have beaten the United States in a total war because they whipped the US-equipped and trained ARVN in a limited one.
This topic is dealt with extensively in this thread:
https://forum.juhlin.com/showthread....fense+Red+Army
By that logic, wouldn't the OPFOR be half-assing it during those exercises too? In that case, the conclusion that CAG's are vulnerable to submarine attack still stands up (if both sides aren't trying, and the OPFOR still manages to sink a carrier, it stands to reason they could also do it if both sides were trying). Or are you contending that only USN sailors don't take exercises seriously? And, not to discount your nephew, but one person is a tiny small sample size. My little brother is career naval officer going on 20 years of service and he doesn't slack, or allow his sailors to slack, during exercises. You could poll the entire active duty USN about how hard they try during exercises and get a wide range of responses.
Discussions of canon are inherently subjective. One man's "improvement" is another's "ruining it". Every GM is free to revise their own T2kU as they see fit, but trying to "fix" it for everyone is a slippery slope. v1 canon is what it is. Some of us want to reconcile with canon as much as possible (I fall into that camp); some want to revise or even rewrite it. Neither approach is wrong, necessarily. It becomes an issue when folks start using value words like "should" or "shouldn't", or pushing their POV hard on others.
re CivGov naval resources, there must be a few, as canon has CivGov sending reinforcements to Yugoslavia relatively late in the war. I can't imagine that they'd send troop ships, un-escorted, across the Atlantic and into the hostile Mediterranean.