The U.S. Navy’s low-frequency sonar offensive against whales

The U.S. Navy’s low-frequency sonar offensive against whales is a military response to attacks at sea that treats acoustic force as a means of regaining control. Judith Li launches the offensive while the wider crisis is already defeating conventional measures: the whales do not retreat from the sonar, and the operation is ultimately described as unsuccessful. Its importance lies in that reversal. A measure intended to make the ocean accessible to human responders instead exposes the limits—and costs—of trying to command a crisis whose agents may themselves be under outside control.

Launch and operational rationale

The offensive forms part of a wider effort to contain marine threats. Li describes other measures already in use: dragnets sweep the seabed in an attempt to cull the worms, while nets are deployed in strategic coastal areas to keep marine life away. Against that background, sonar is not presented as an isolated experiment but as another instrument in an expanding campaign of anti-invasion measures. The response assumes that distinct dangers can be met with practical tools deployed at sea, even as the threats continue to exceed those tools.

Li tells Anawak that she has launched the sonar offensive against the whales. The immediate operational hope is not necessarily to resolve every attack, but to keep the whales away long enough for divers or robots to be sent down. This objective connects the attack on the animals to a larger problem of access and knowledge: without people or equipment able to investigate underwater, the responders cannot see what is happening below the surface. In the crisis briefing, Li describes the human response as nearly blind without divers, probes, or submersibles, and notes that lost nets and missing trawlers compound the difficulty. Sonar is therefore meant to create a temporary opening for other operations, not to explain the source of the disturbances.

Method and underlying assumption

The method is SURTASS LFA low-frequency active sonar. Li’s stated expectation is that its use will severely harm the whales; she characterizes killing them as the only way the operation can work. The offensive thus turns a tactical goal—keeping the animals away from responders—into a policy willing to destroy the very creatures whose behavior it is trying to manage. The distinction between deterrence and lethal force collapses in the plan as Li describes it.

The policy also rests on an assumption about control. Li argues that someone is controlling the creatures and that the human response must answer control with control. Yet the whales do not behave as an ordinary target would: they do not flee from the noise, despite the pain it causes them. Li says they are not in control, even while they continue to terrorize the waters. That account complicates the offensive’s logic. If the animals are being compelled, attacking them may punish the visible agents without reaching whatever is directing their behavior. The operation confronts an observable threat while leaving its proposed cause unresolved.

Failure and reassessment

The result is failure rather than command. When Anawak asks whether the offensive is working, Li says it has not achieved the desired results and that the authorities are close to abandoning it. They are trying everything, she explains, but even temporarily keeping whales away would only improve the chance of sending divers or robots below. The distinction matters: the operation has a limited, enabling purpose, and even that purpose is not being met. The sonar does not provide a reliable corridor for investigation.

Li’s account also makes the cost of that failure plain. The animals remain in the water, still posing a danger, while the response is described as causing them pain and potentially killing them. The offensive therefore offers neither a successful defense nor a route to understanding. Its abandonment is not evidence that the whale attacks have ended; it marks the failure of this particular attempt to change their behavior. The underlying need to reach the underwater environment remains.

Significance in the crisis

The offensive condenses a recurring conflict in the response to the oceanic emergencies: human institutions seek to restore access and authority by applying force, although the conditions below the surface are poorly understood. The ocean’s depths are described elsewhere as a realm beyond ordinary observation, and the inability to send down divers, probes, or submersibles leaves decision-makers dependent on incomplete knowledge. Against that uncertainty, sonar is both a weapon and an attempted substitute for access—a way to alter the situation before it can be investigated.

But the whales’ failure to flee unsettles the expectation that greater force will produce greater control. Li’s own report acknowledges both the animals’ distress and their lack of agency, while the operation continues to treat them as targets. The offensive consequently reveals a mismatch between diagnosis and response: the suspected control of the creatures points toward a cause beyond the whales themselves, but the military action is directed at the creatures within reach. Its lack of success reinforces the broader crisis’s lesson that the sea cannot be made legible or governable simply by escalating human force.