WSJ

Court Affirms Navy’s Right to Train; ASW Is No Game

Regarding your editorial “[1] The Greens Get Harpooned” (Nov. 13): Since moving to the West Coast I have been following Natural Resources Defense Council v. Winter more closely, since there are fewer whale pods on the East Coast with damaged hearing.

I was reminded of my Navy service in Task Group Alfa sailing out of Norfolk in the 1960s. Our command was to search for enemy submarines from Iceland to the Caribbean, using all the technologies available including magnetic anomaly detector gear and passive sonar. It may be history now, but the Soviets were aggressively seeking clandestine positions along the Atlantic Coast and the Canadian Maritimes.

Task Group Alfa was constantly in “training exercises” in search for Soviet subs. At least once our ship was torpedoed by an unidentified sub that zeroed in on the USS Randolph, hitting us with a dummy fish. I was on a sound-powered telephone in direct contact with damage control central, which confirmed we had been hit when I asked what the big bang was that I heard on the port aft quarter. The torpedo, weighing perhaps a ton, had dislodged ammunition in a magazine, which I felt and heard exploding seven decks directly below my battle station.

These training exercises might sound like innocent games to the uninitiated, but they clearly are not. Antisubmarine warfare is more keenly needed today due to threats from nations seeking not only targets but vulnerabilities and potential hiding places.

The Supreme Court was correct in its deference to national security. The dissenters are not only typical of the left but seem to believe that whale well-being trumps our nation’s safety. God help us all.

J.T. Arbuckle
Beverly Hills, Calif.

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Protect Whales as the Navy Trains

Despite its amusing headline, your editorial about the Supreme Court’s sonar decision last week (”[1] The Greens Get Harpooned,” Nov. 13) misses the boat.

This never was a case about whether whales trump national security. Obviously, they don’t. Ultimately, this case was about how much of the harm that sonar exercises inflict on whales is necessary for effective training, and how much harm can be eliminated without eroding the skill of sailors.

Sonar’s harm to whales is not in doubt. The Navy itself estimated that the exercises at issue were likely to permanently injure more than 450 whales, damage the hearing of about 8,000 whales, and significantly disturb 170,000 marine mammals.

Is this damage necessary? Or to put it another way, were the safeguards ordered by the courts to reduce that predicted harm likely to degrade sonar training?

It is unfortunate that this case never resolved that question. Instead, the Supreme Court merely ruled that the lower courts should have bought the Navy’s argument on faith, regardless of its holes.

As the courts indicated, what’s really at stake for the Navy is not its ability to defend ships and sailors, but convenience. True, reducing sonar harm to whales and dolphins may occasionally slow things down. But if our bedrock environmental laws mean anything, it is that convenience does not trump our duty as stewards of the natural world.

Joel Reynolds
Natural Resources Defense Council
Santa Monica, Calif.

Mr. Reynolds was lead counsel for plaintiffs in NRDC v. Winter, the case about sonar and whales.

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Thar She Blows: Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Navy, Against Whales

Posted by Keith Johnson

In case you were wondering, national security does indeed trump whale security.

In the first decision of the new term, the U.S. Supreme Court [3] ruled for the U.S. Navy in a dispute over submarine training, sonar, and whales off the coast of California. Environmentalists led by the Natural Resources Defense Council sought to limit the Navy’s use of sonar, which they [4] said wreaked havoc among certain whale populations.

That might very well be so, the Supremes ruled, but that’s hardly the point: “The Navy’s need to conduct realistic training with active sonar to respond to the threat posed by enemy submarines plainly outweighs” the plaintiff’s argument, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. While the court had few doubts about the the public environmental benefits of a healthy whale population, a healthy submarine strike force is quite a bit more important:

The use of MFA sonar under realistic conditions during training exercises is clearly of the utmost importance to the Navy and the Nation. The Court does not question the importance of plaintiffs’ ecological, scientific, and recreational interests, but it concludes that the balance of equities and consideration of the overall public interest tip strongly in favor of the Navy. The determination of where the public interest lies in this case does not strike the Court as a close question.

The case was seen as a test of whether the U.S. government could sidestep some environmental restrictions on national security grounds, after a lower court ordered the Navy to limit the use of sonar. For now, national security 1, environmentalists.  Permalink: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/11/12/thar-she-blows-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-navy-against-whales/