He implied that other companies did hire too many 50-year-old white guys, because they wanted people with lots of sub experience, so this supports your theory. Anyone with previous sub experience would be more likely to know what a safe environment did (and did not) look like.

So is the underlying assumption for this comment chain so far that only old white guys could possibly have enough experience, training or other safety expertise? Or that specifically the absence of an old white man is what doomed them? And not the mile-long list of corners he cut, very knowingly?

And to do that, do we have to ignore that he fired a safety engineer for expressing concerns?

No the underlying assumption is that (among the other items on the mile-long list of cut corners) prioritizing demographics over experience and training was a bad idea.

I don't think that "only old white guys could possibly have enough experience, training or other safety expertise". However, it is probably true that if you exclude that part of the labor pool that does not like your safety look, then you may end up hiring a lot of young people who don't have much experience. Needing an excuse for this, one could claim that you're just avoiding old white guys, which sounds better than avoiding workers with experience to know what a normal safety culture looks like in a submarine.

As to the racial makeup of the experienced-in-a-submarine demographic, I don't know of any data on that, but I would not be surprised if it were mostly anglo.

This is more or less my own take, I just got an impression that the GP was pushing a "woke-ism sunk the sub" (which is not farcical, because gestures at everything), which seems like missing the forest by a long shot.

Indeed seasoned professionals in general tend to ask more questions in spite of one’s body features.

Everyone on the sub was literally that demographics ...

guys, the sub was woke