With concerns about Iran laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was asked Tuesday whether Iran might turn to dolphins to help confront the US Navy.
He said that he could “confirm” that Iran didn’t have dolphins to deploy as part of operations but said he would neither “confirm or deny whether we have kamikaze dolphins.”
One source familiar with US operations in the Strait of Hormuz told CNN that the US military isn’t using dolphins as part of its efforts in the Strait. But the US Navy does, in fact, have a decades-old program to train dolphins to help detect mines.
The Marine Mammal Program is a part of the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Department within Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific. The department’s dolphins are not kamikaze dolphins in that they do not sacrifice their lives to detonate mines. Instead, they’re focused on detection.
“We use marine mammals to help detect objects under water and to protect ports by detecting intruders,” Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at RAND who previously worked with the now-decommissioned US Navy mine warfare command, told CNN. “So it’s not ‘The Day of the Dolphin.’”
The US isn’t alone in using dolphins for military purposes — Russia has used them to guard ports, and Iran purchased dolphins in 2000, according to the BBC. Those dolphins would likely be too old to be used today, and there is no indication that Iran has an active dolphin program, though the Wall Street Journal reported last month that Iran was considering mine-carrying dolphins as a novel way to combat the US efforts to open the Strait.
The question to Hegseth on Tuesday comes amid questions about the ceasefire between the US and Iran, after shots were fired by both sides as tensions escalated in the Strait of Hormuz. CNN reported in March that Iran had started laying mines in the Strait; Hegseth said in April that laying mines would violate the tentative ceasefire agreement and that the US military would “deal with that.”
The US Navy’s dolphin program has been around since 1959, focused on training bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to detect and recover objects underwater. According to the Marine Mammal Program’s webpage, dolphins “possess the most sophisticated sonar known to science,” and underwater drones are “no match for the animals.”
“Both dolphins and sea lions have excellent low light vision and underwater directional hearing that allow them to detect and track undersea targets, even in dark or murky waters,” the website says. “Dolphins are trained to search for and mark the location of undersea mines that could threaten the safety of those on board military or civilian ships.”
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