A few friends posted links to a long article in the New York Times last week on whales. To summarize the article: whales are amazing, almost human-like in their capacity for emotion, play, and interaction; the Navy's sonar may be killing some of them; it's too bad the Supreme Court declined to stop the Navy.

My most memorable experience with whales occurred when I was Officer of the Deck of USS Leftwich just off Oahu in 1996. Grey whales were in the middle of their migration from winter feeding grounds in Alaska to their breeding grounds in Mexico. They liked to linger on relatively shallow Penguin Bank, between Oahu and Molokai, which was a sort of way station on their long trip across the vast and deep Pacific basin. On a break between fleet exercises, I asked the sonar techs to tune our passive sonar to the whales' songs, and patch it over the internal communication box. We then followed the whales from a safe distance, watching them broach, tail slap, and play, while hearing them sing to each other. It was amazing.

Later, we ran an anti-submarine warfare (ASW) exercise with a Naval Reserve ship mostly staffed by civilian contractors. The ship had a special experimental array that could "sonify" the ocean, providing incredible intelligence about what was happening under the water. My destroyer's active sonar dome was highly advanced, but looking for submarines, especially quiet diesel electrics in busy waterways, was like stumbling around in darkness with a book of matches, lighting them up at random intervals, and hoping to find something. In  contrast, the experimental sonar was like simply turning on the lights. It was just a dramatic step-function difference.

Several months later I read that a pod of whales had beached themselves on the coast of Oregon at about the same time we had been conducting our exercise, and a few died. A marine researcher called the mass beaching bizarre, like the whales' internal navigation system had failed. The temperature gradients of the ocean create ducts that enable sound to travel great distances, and I wondered if our experiment could have been a contributor. As the Times article describes, these concerns are still playing out over a decade later between environmentalists and the Navy.

The issue is that there is no way to conduct effective training exercises without actually using sonar. And submarines are a threat we must be ready to address. Today a bunch of rag-tag Somali teenagers with AK-47s, rocket propelled grenades, and light-weight boats are causing a lot of havoc in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden, which are the approaches to the important Suez Canal. Imagine what could happen if Iran decides to deploy highly trained professionals in modern diesel electric submarines to close the Straight of Hormuz, or China deploys nuclear submarines to the Straight of Malacca. Approximately 95% of the world's commerce and trade happens over water. Though the US Navy totally dominates the ocean, allowing the entire global trade system to function, we cannot take this dominance for granted.

So though I find whales very inspiring, support continued environmental and scientific research about them, and want the Navy to take as many actions as possible to protect them (which it is doing), we also need to make sure the Navy can continue to conduct realistic training exercises to counter a serious threat. As we used to train our watch officers: eternal vigilance in the price of safety. We need to find a way to save the whales, while also maintaining our ability to keep the seas free. The Supreme Court made the right decision.