Amid concerns that Iran may be laying mines in the strategic waterway, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was asked on Tuesday whether Iran might turn to dolphins to counter the US Navy, reports CNN.
He said he could “confirm” that Iran does not have dolphins to deploy operationally but added that he could neither “confirm nor deny whether USA have kamikaze dolphins”.
One source familiar with US operations in the Strait told CNN that the US military is not currently using dolphins there. However, the Navy does run a decades-old program training dolphins to help detect mines.
The Marine Mammal Program, part of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, focuses on detection, not suicide missions. As CNN notes, these are not “kamikaze dolphins” that sacrifice their lives to detonate mines.
“We use marine mammals to help detect objects underwater and to protect ports by detecting intruders,” Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at RAND and former US Navy mine warfare command staff, told CNN. “So it’s not ‘The Day of the Dolphin.’”
The US isn’t alone: Russia has used dolphins to guard ports, and Iran reportedly purchased dolphins in 2000, according to the BBC.
Those animals would likely be too old for active use today, and there’s no indication Iran has an operational program, though the Wall Street Journal reported last month that Iran was considering mine-carrying dolphins as a novel tactic.
The Pentagon’s dolphin program dates back to 1959, training bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to detect and recover underwater objects. According to the program’s website, dolphins possess “the most sophisticated sonar known to science,” and underwater drones are “no match for the animals.”
During a detection mission, a dolphin travels with two or three handlers in a small boat, tapping a front paddle if it finds something and a rear paddle if it doesn’t, per the Naval Undersea Museum. The animals drop marker buoys near mines for human divers to disable.
Still, dolphins are not typically used in active combat environments like the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, Savitz told CNN. Instead, they’ve been used post-conflict — such as in 2003, when they helped detect mines near the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr after southern Iraq had been secured.
“Hostilities had basically ceased,” Savitz said. “You’re not trying to fight your way in with dolphins.”
A key point, Savitz added, is that the animals can leave whenever they’re released into open water. “They choose to come back because they like the free fish,” he told CNN.
“There are always questions about animal welfare, but these animals actively choose to stay in the program when they could just join the wild.”
