War of the Whales (26 page)

Long before the Bahamas stranding—and particularly since the Greek stranding four years earlier—Pittenger had been ringing the bell about the need to bring sonar exercises inside the permitting and regulation process. He realized that with its new generations of high-powered active sonars, the Navy was engaged in “acoustic warfare.” The sooner it started getting permission through proper channels, he reasoned, the better. His message to his fellow admirals, active and retired, had been dire and direct: “The end of active sonar is in sight unless we do something to change the way we operate.” Now he wished he’ d rung that bell even louder.

He worried that the active sonar program he’ d nurtured, and which he still viewed as crucial to national defense, was imperiled not only by environmental activists, but by the cavalier attitude of many in the Navy leadership. One three-star admiral he’ d tried to persuade on the topic had said, “Tell me again, why are we having all this discussion about some fish?” To which Pittenger replied, “Because if we don’t it could shut down our Navy.” He’ d been down this road before. For years the Navy brass had insisted—in defiance of an unstoppable social and legal tide to the contrary—that women couldn’t be integrated into the fighting fleet. Now he was girding for what he feared would be another bungled engagement with the media and the forces of social change.

In the days leading up to the conference call, Pittenger had tried to convince both the active-duty and retired admirals he knew that the Navy needed to get out in front of this stranding mess. As soon as the commanders realized that fleet exercises were likely involved, he argued, they should have said straight out and in public, “We’ve got a problem, and we’re going to fix it.” Instead, the fleet had placed its battle readiness in the hands of lawyers, none of whom had ever commanded sailors or ships in combat.

•  •  •

The Secretary ran the conference call, though he did very little of the talking. The review was conducted with precision and civility. No one spoke out of turn, as Danzig methodically polled the participants on whether or not he should curtail sonar exercises, and why.

The Secretary wanted to hear first from Ketten, who had recently returned from the Bahamas. Speaking from Pittenger’s office, she reported her suspicions of acoustic trauma, based on her beachside necropsy. It was impossible to identify the source of that trauma, and the heads weren’t due up at Harvard for another few days. So she didn’t want to speculate on what she’ d find. Since the underwater topography and acoustics of the Bahamas were unlikely to exist anywhere else, she cautioned against generalizing a sonar threat to marine mammals from this one stranding event, even if it turned out to be sonar related.

Next up was Gaffney. After he ruled out any connection between ONR’s sea tests north of the islands and the strandings, he reported that so far his acoustic teams hadn’t been able to identify any
nonmilitary
acoustic sound sources in the canyon on March 15. No industrial explosives. No earthquakes or sea storms. He noted that ONR had circulated its cautionary report from the Greek stranding to all the commanding officers in the fleet four years earlier. And since that 1996 incident, ONR had undertaken a more formal permitting process. In this case, it had conducted its Environmental Assessments in collaboration with the Southeast Regional Office of Fisheries, which had issued ONR a permit to conduct tests of its Littoral Warfare weapons.

Admirals Fallon and Natter knew they were in the hot seat. They felt that Danzig was trying to get them to acknowledge that the fleet’s antisubmarine exercises caused the strandings. But neither of them was willing to concede the point. Fallon adamantly resisted any curtailment of sonar exercises. Expressing the strongest emotion of anyone during the call, he asserted, “It would be easy to shut down sonar exercises—but doing the easy thing isn’t our job.” Natter stated his opposition to a shutdown in more muted language. The investigation had just begun, he pointed out, and they’ d only been able to eliminate a few of the possible causes of the strandings. Then he punted to Pittenger, in the hopes that the Secretary might defer to the most experienced admiral on the call.

An obsessive student of naval history, Pittenger felt compelled to share his historical perspective on the high cost of nonpreparedness. It had happened time and again: as soon as the US Navy decisively defeated an enemy, the politicians slashed its funding, and the Navy fell behind in the never-ending chase after more rigorous antisubmarine warfare training. At the end of World War II, a war-weary nation cut back on defense spending, while the Soviet submarine fleet swelled in numbers. After the Vietnam War, Nixon sought détente with the Soviets, just as Russia was rolling out its quietest, most deadly class of submarines. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the politicians in search of savings were delighted to turn a blind eye to the non-Soviet threats in oceans.

By the late 1990s, the navies of virtually every aspiring power in the developing world boasted quiet attack submarines, among them Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Iran. Forty-three navies worldwide operated submarines—even nations as militarily insignificant as Thailand, Algeria, and Colombia.
³
At any given time, submarines from a dozen different navies might be patrolling the waterways of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, including Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And in the Pacific, China was quickly building up a naval force, while the North Koreans had dozens of submarines and Chinese-made midget subs circulating in the waters off the East Asian coastline.

For all their armaments and high-tech sensors, the Navy’s warships remained vulnerable to the most destabilizing, asymmetrical force in the ocean: a rogue submarine lying in wait along the side of an underwater canyon. A single torpedo could sink a modern battleship up to frigate size. Cruisers and destroyers could probably withstand one hit, but two well-placed torpedo strikes could split them in half. Even a massive aircraft carrier was at risk. Ships could be replaced, but the real hostages to unpreparedness were the hundreds of crew members serving on each battleship—or the thousands aboard an aircraft supercarrier.

Active sonar remained the only way to track virtually silent diesel-electric subs. “Antisubmarine warfare is hard,” he told Secretary Danzig. “Sonar is complicated. You put sound in the water, and it doesn’t go straight. It winds its way through shadow zones and convergent zones, around sea mounts and underwater storms.” To be effective in combat, he insisted, sonar operators have to train in a full spectrum of battle environments and situations. Once acquired, sonar training is a fragile and perishable skill. If you don’t train constantly and in real-world conditions for antisubmarine warfare, you’re dead in the water. That’s why war games are such deadly serious business.

Pittenger respectfully but emphatically asked the Secretary to maintain the level of fleet training and readiness required for national security. But he also advised the Secretary to take a middle path between caving to the environmentalists and going to war with them. If the Navy wanted to maintain the moral high ground, he said, it should acknowledge that something had gone awry in the Bahamas and resolve publicly to get to the bottom of it. There was no reason, he suggested, why sonar training exercises couldn’t proceed in parallel with a vigorous and transparent investigation into the cause of the Bahamas stranding. Stonewalling for weeks after a public incident like this only played into the environmentalists’ hands and undermined the Navy’s credibility with the public.

When it was Pirie’s turn to weigh in, he staked out a position halfway between the intransigence of the fleet commanders and the environmental appeasement he feared the Secretary might be contemplating. Pirie expressed his concern that the fleet might be compromised operationally by a shutdown. He urged the Secretary “not to set a precedent that anytime something went wrong the Navy would turn everything off and only turn it back on when everyone was positive nothing could go wrong again.” Pirie was indirectly mocking the “precautionary principle” embedded in the Marine Mammal Protection Act that he felt environmentalists waved like a banner of righteousness every time someone put a microphone in front of them.

As he listened, Danzig was making his own precautionary assessment of the risk and benefit of rejecting versus accommodating NRDC’s demands for a sonar shutdown. He asked Frank Stone what kind of environmental precautions N-45 and the fleet had taken in advance of the exercises in Great Bahama Canyon. Stone walked him through the Atlantic Fleet’s standard protocol for training exercises: fleet training’s internal environmental shop had conducted its own Environmental Assessment of the expected impact of the planned exercises on marine mammals in the area. Since the assessment had arrived at a Finding of No Significant Impact, the Navy was not required to conduct a more detailed Environmental Impact Statement. Fleet training had signed the assessment and sent a copy to N-45. Stone had then filed a memo with Fisheries confirming the report’s Finding of No Significant Impact.

When Danzig asked Stone and the admirals what measures were in place to prevent a similar event of “No Significant Impact” from occurring during the next training exercise, no one responded.

•  •  •

Following the call, Danzig reviewed his notes and his options. In the two weeks since the whales had stranded in the Bahamas, the media coverage hadn’t let up. There seemed to be an endless supply of gruesome photographs and conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. With the Vieques situation still in the spotlight and international lawsuits pending, Danzig didn’t want the Bahamas to become another case study of the US Navy’s environmental recklessness.

The Secretary understood it was past time to formulate a formal public response, even though he was still working with incomplete information. Within a few days of the strandings, everyone involved knew that there was no plausible way that ONR’s activities could have caused whales to strand on the south side of the island. On the other hand, there was likely some link between the fleet’s sonar exercises in the canyon and the whale strandings—though the acoustic modeling of events wouldn’t be complete for several more weeks. Danzig had to choose between acknowledging the Navy’s probable culpability now, or waiting until he had a complete story to tell about what caused the strandings and what steps the Navy was implementing to prevent future incidents.

Danzig had one strategic advantage: he knew about the fleet exercises, and Reynolds didn’t. So far Reynolds and the public were focused on ONR’s sonobuoy tests, because there was a transparent paper trail of its Environmental Assessment and the permit issued by Fisheries. This information gap offered Danzig a move that would limit the Navy’s exposure without bowing to the demands of his environmental antagonists.

Danzig chose the only decision that would prevent the possibility of another whale stranding before he had all the facts of the Bahamas incident in hand: he issued a confidential all-fleet bulletin suspending sonar exercises in deep-water environments until further notice. To appease the admirals, and to keep Reynolds guessing, he didn’t make the sonar shutdown public. He preferred to keep the press and the public focused on ONR’s activities in the Bahamas, because ONR could plausibly deny any connection between its tests and the strandings. This would buy Danzig some time to get the Navy’s story straight before acknowledging any sonar exercises in the neighborhood of the strandings. In the meantime, his priority was to keep the whales in the ocean where they belonged and the Navy out of court.

•  •  •

A few days later, Reynolds was at his desk early, drinking coffee and reading the latest AP story in that morning’s
Los Angeles Times
:

U.S. NAVY SAYS EXERCISE DID NOT PROMPT BAHAMAS WHALE BEACHINGS

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico

The U.S. Navy denied Thursday accusations by environmentalists that an anti-submarine exercise in the Bahamas in March caused 11 whales to beach themselves.

Four of the stranded whales were discovered four hours before the exercise began on March 15, and the others were found more than 75 miles away, Rear Adm. Paul Gaffney, Chief of the Office of Naval Research, said in a letter to the Washington-based U.S. Humane Society.

The exercise “could not have been responsible,” Gaffney said.

The Navy has said it was testing upgrades of a buoy system used to track submarines. One buoy emitted a sonar signal that was received by another while a submarine moved between the two devices. . . .

He also noted that some whales stranded themselves on the south side of Abaco, the side facing away from the buoys. Gaffney noted the Navy had done an environmental impact study before the test. “The Navy takes its stewardship-of-the-seas responsibility very seriously,” he said.

Environmental groups said Thursday they were unconvinced. . . . Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist for the Humane Society, and Joel Reynolds, director of the Los Angeles office of Natural Resources Defense Council, said they would press for more information.

Reynolds folded the newspaper and tossed it into the recycling bin. He had the uncomfortable feeling of having been played, without knowing how or exactly by whom.

Balcomb, reading the same article online from Abaco, reacted as a former sonar officer. The Navy’s tactic reminded him of a last-ditch evasive maneuver that WWII submariners had occasionally resorted to when they’ d been spotted by an enemy’s active sonar. The captain would release the ship’s garbage from its aft compartment, or even through a torpedo bay, leaving a trail of debris that would disrupt the enemy’s sonar—and hopefully the guidance mechanism of any torpedo aimed at the submarine. Balcomb had to smile. It was a desperation tactic, but sometimes it worked.

* Both Admirals Natter and Fallon went on to assume four-star leadership commands in the Navy. Natter became commander, US Atlantic Fleet/Fleet Forces Command, while Fallon became the first naval officer to rise to commander, US Central Command. On March 11, 2008, Fallon announced his resignation from CENTCOM and retirement from active duty, citing administrative complications caused in part by an
Esquire
magazine article that described him as the only thing standing between the Bush administration and war with Iran.