As the U.S. military is all-volunteer, is there perhaps an attorney who could help dolphins and sea lions fight their conscription into the Navy?
(Maybe the mammals could violate “Don’t ask, don’t tell” en masse.)
After three and half years of clearing environmental evaluations regarding possible health dangers to the super swimmers (they “aren’t expected to be harmed”), the Navy is ready to launch its “swimmer interdiction security system” at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor.
We agreed with criticism of this plan when it was proposed (including a federal judge’s decision against the same plan in 1989), but such concerns rolled off the military like water off a dolphin’s back. The main problem, biologists testified at public hearings, is that Hood Canal is too cold for Atlantic bottlenose dolphins coming from San Diego waters where the Navy trains them.
The Navy countered that the dolphins will be kept in temperature-controlled enclosures and only patrol the cold water in two-hour shifts. What, no high-tech, dolphin-sized drysuits?
The focus on animal welfare is natural, but it distracts from the even bigger question — does this make sense?
According to the Navy, the program is the best way it could meet new, post-9/11 terrorism-driven security requirements.
The Navy says that dolphins and sea lions can find intruders by themselves and have been doing so for years at other bases (where the water is warmer). Well, the apprehension of such intruders must be top-secret, because it’s hard to find reports about swimmers trying to infiltrate Navy bases but being stopped by military marine mammals.
In the waters outside Naval Kitsap-Bangor, the dolphins will patrol for terrorists, accompanied by a handler, while sea lions will carry special cuffs attached to long ropes in their mouths, which they can clamp around the leg of a suspicious diver.
We hate trying to put ourselves in a would-be terrorist’s scuba gear, but if we did, we could imagine carrying something to shoot and kill marine animals that were trying to stop us from delivering our underwater explosives.
Or a terrorist could attach something explosive to the dolphin to take back to its trainer at the same time the dolphin attaches a strobe light to the suspected terrorist, as it is trained to do.
Or a terrorist could show up with its own army of marine animals.
While trying to guard against and prevent every conceivable (and inconceivable) terrorist attack is a natural outcome of 9/11, this program seems to operate on the principle that doing something is better than doing nothing, whether it makes us safer or not.
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