| Osama bin Laden gets help from the strangest creatures. As
America's military struggles to prepare its forces for the War on Terror,
radical environmentalists are using marine life -- whales, dolphins, and
even squid -- to try to block sea-based training exercises and technological
innovations needed to ensure combat readiness.
Earlier this year, the Navy and Defense Department asked
Congress to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The federal law was
passed in 1972 to protect ocean life. But its poor wording and ridiculously
broad standards undermine our armed forces and endanger national security.
The law bars any and all "harassment" of marine mammals -- including "any
act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance" which might have "the potential to
injure" or "the potential to disturb" a marine mammal or marine mammal
stock.
This murky language means that the Navy can't make a single
splash without worrying whether some eco-extremist group will sue them for
flipping out Flipper or stressing out the seaweed. Taken literally, one Navy
official points out, the law could classify the wake from a naval vessel as
a harassing force if it simply caused a seal sleeping on a buoy to dive into
the water.
Even the former Clinton administration saw the litigious havoc
the law could wreak on military operations, and along with several
government agencies and the independent National Research Council, supported
a statutory change requiring that the injury or disturbance to marine
mammals be deemed "significant." But Congress, pressured by environmental
and ocean advocacy groups, refuses to amend the language. The House is set
to reauthorize the Marine Mammal Protection Act this week without the
military's requested change.
So under the current law -- the War on Terror be damned -- Navy
exercise planners and scientists must obtain an environmental permit in
advance of every mission or activity that would potentially annoy or disturb
marine life. According to Navy officials, it takes at least four months, if
not years, to complete the application process for a permit (effective for
only one year). The process is mired by obstructionist environmental
activists who champion the so-called "precautionary principle," which holds
the military to the impossible standard of proving that its activities will
cause absolutely no harm to the environment.
The paralyzing threat to military readiness of this extremist
regulatory philosophy is grave. According to Navy Admiral William J. Fallon,
vice-chief of naval operations, three ships from the U.S.S. Carl Vinson
battle group were deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom without crucial
anti-ship cruise missile defensive training because such training would
"potentially disturb" seals when target drones flew over them. Naval
researchers have been blocked from improving the Navy's capability to detect
enemy submarines by groups opposed to underwater sound testing and
measurements.
And several environmental groups have announced their intention
to challenge the Bush administration's deployment of the Navy's Low
Frequency Active Sonar, a key defense against stealthy, ultra-quiet diesel
submarines being developed by China, Russia and Germany. Despite numerous
precautions and mitigation measures being taken by the Navy, Mark Palmer of
the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute fretted on CNN last weekend
that the system is a "sonar bomb" developed by the Navy "to attack whales
and other sorts of things in the name of finding submarines, and we don't
think it's appropriate. We know very little about the effects on fish, on
squid, on other types of marine organisms."
Foreign enemies invaded our borders and murdered over 3,000 men,
women and children on Sept. 11. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women
have volunteered to make sure it doesn't happen again. And all this guy can
worry about is the comfort level of squid and plankton?
Of course, Navy planners should be conscientious environmental
stewards. They are. The branch will spend upward of $700 million next year
on environmental protection alone. But the balance between environmental
protection and military effectiveness is out of whack. Isn't it time to put
American lives over spineless invertebrates -- human and otherwise?
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