A Pentagon press briefing took a strange turn Tuesday when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked about rumors of Iranian “kamikaze dolphins” in the Strait of Hormuz.
Though Hegseth said that Iran did not have dolphins strapped with explosives at their disposal, he also “[could not] confirm or deny” whether [the U.S.] has them.
While America’s military strategy in Project Freedom might not include kamikaze dolphins, experts have said the marine mammals are highly capable and dolphins have been used by the U.S. military for decades.
The marine mammals have been trained by the Navy to help detect mines – like those Iran has deployed in the Strait of Hormuz.
“They can not only locate objects, but differentiate them with a greater degree of facility than the machines that we’ve been able to develop for this purpose,” Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation who previously worked with the now-dismantled Navy mine warfare command, told Mint.
The Navy has worked to train dozens of bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to guard against underwater threats since 1959, the branch’s San Diego research center says on its website.
Researchers first used dolphins in studies to make torpedoes that could better travel underwater, the non-profit U.S. Naval Institute says.
Then, the Navy started to study the animal’s other capabilities, deploying them in Vietnam in 1970 and in Iraq in 2003.
Dolphins are uniquely qualified for the program that is currently conducted up and down the West Coast.
That’s largely because of their ability to see in low-light conditions, underwater directional hearing and sonar, which enable them to use sound waves to detect objects on the ocean floor.
“Dolphins naturally possess the most sophisticated sonar known to science. Mines and other potentially dangerous objects on the ocean floor that are difficult to detect with electronic sonar, especially in coastal shallows or cluttered harbors, are easily found by the dolphins,” the Navy says.
They can also dive hundreds of feet below the surface without illness – unlike human divers.
And dolphins are some of the smartest animals on Earth. Research shows that bottlenose dolphins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror, use names, work together in teams and have bigger brains than humans.
They share some of our personality traits, too, U.K. researchers say.
