Investor's Business Daily, August 7th, 2007
National Security: A judge has told the Navy that it cannot use high-powered sonar in its training exercises off the California coast. Saving marine animals, it seems, is more important than protecting American lives.
The Navy has 11 training exercises scheduled for Southern California waters over the next two years. Part of the training focuses on the use of mid-frequency sonar which is strong enough to track even the quietest submarines.
Environmentalists, however, believe the sonar harms marine life. They say there are several cases in which the sonar caused whales to panic and beach themselves, including an incident in Spain where spooked whales died from the bends after surfacing too fast.
The Navy has a different position, of course, and it can refer to a mass whale stranding in 2005 off North Carolina's coast -- called "one of the largest and most troubling in two decades" by the Washington Post -- to support its case. In that instance, scientists could not determine if naval sonar was the cause.
No one wants to purposely kill, or even mildly harm, whales or any other sea life during military exercises. There are no whaling ships and no Captain Ahabs in today's Navy.
So one has to wonder where the sense of proportionality is here.
Isn't there an implication on the part of the environmentalists that whales are on the same life-form level as humans? When, then, do bugs on a windshield become a cause for the activist community to rally behind?
The environmentalists would surely stay away from that comparison because it's obvious that insects are not the same as large mammalian sea creatures -- to which we say: It's obvious that whales are not human. Treating them as such is an exercise in nitwittery.
The Navy's use of mid-frequency sonar has not been banned for use during actual battle or when a real threat is detected. But unless sailors are properly trained on the system, their ability to operate it will be impaired during the stresses of a wartime situation.
Making a mistake with sonar could be disastrous to a U.S. city, not just the sailors in the combat theater. Modern submarines carry intercontinental ballistic missiles, both nuclear and conventional, that can fly thousands of miles beyond their launch point. No location in America is outside these missiles' range.
While environmental lawyers are dragging the Navy into court, at least 40 countries are sailing submarines that might be quiet enough to elude traditional sonar detection.
Among those are a number of nations that are hostile -- or could become hostile -- to the U.S., including North Korea and Iran. And many of them use the mid-frequency sonar. Why doesn't the Natural Resources Defense Council file lawsuits against them?
This is not about whales, it's about our ability to protect ourselves from human enemies. Whales might be cute to some and we don't dispute that they are an important link in our global ecosystem; but one human life is far more precious than an entire herd of whales.
