The U.S. Navy sonar offensive against whales is a coercive attempt to reclaim access to waters where marine attacks have made human operations dangerous. Using SURTASS LFA, the military tries to force the whales away with intense sound; Judith Li’s account makes the contradiction plain. The animals do not retreat, and the method can work only by killing them. The offensive therefore promises neither control nor safety: it inflicts harm while leaving the crisis unresolved.

Causes and Strategic Purpose

The sonar campaign grows out of a much wider emergency. The response already includes fishing worms from the sea, using dragnets to sweep the seabed, and placing nets along strategic coasts to keep marine life away. Li describes these as measures of containment, but also recognizes their limits: the worms keep appearing, marine animals can threaten other coasts, and the underlying activity remains hidden below the surface. With divers, probes, and submersibles difficult to deploy, human forces lack the means to see what is happening underwater.

Against that background, the proposed sonar attack is a bid to make the whales themselves yield the space that humans cannot otherwise secure. Li says the navy intends to turn up the sound until the whales’ eardrums rupture. The aim is not framed as an attempt to understand their behavior or communicate with them, but as a means of overpowering them. Its immediate practical purpose is to keep the whales away long enough for divers or robots to be sent down. Even this is a limited objective: temporary access, not a solution to the ocean-wide crisis.

The campaign also belongs to a broader strategy of trying to answer attacks with corresponding force. Li argues that the methods of attack are themselves primitive, and treats violent retaliation as an appropriate response. That reasoning converts uncertainty into a military contest over who can dominate the waters. Yet the offensive rests on a crucial uncertainty of its own: the attackers are not understood, and the whales’ refusal to flee suggests that the navy’s chosen pressure may not affect the forces directing them.

Course of the Offensive

Li first describes the sonar attack as an imminent measure, then the reports present it as an operation already being pursued. In a later conversation with Leon Anawak, she says she has launched the offensive against the whales. She is aboard a U.S. warship near Seattle when Anawak reaches her by secure line, after asking for a few more days away. Her disclosure brings the military response into his personal conversation even as he is in the Arctic with his family.

The operational logic is stark. Li says that the whales do not flee from the sound, as an animal responding to danger ordinarily might. They remain in the waters and continue to terrorize them; she believes they are in terrible pain, yet not in control of their actions. Thus the navy cannot treat the whales’ continued presence as proof that the tactic needs only more time or volume. In Li’s description, the sound is hurting the animals without producing the desired behavior.

The campaign is also constrained by its intended use. The military hopes that keeping whales away, even briefly, will make it possible to send divers or robots into the water. The tactic is therefore a preliminary clearing action, not a direct way to reach or disable whatever lies behind the attacks. Its success depends on the whales changing course; its failure leaves the underwater environment inaccessible and the larger threat untouched.

Failure and Consequences

The evidence of failure accumulates across Li’s reports. At first, the navy is still pressing ahead, though it does not expect significant success. Li says that the whales’ failure to escape leaves killing them as the only way the sonar offensive can achieve its immediate purpose. When Anawak later asks whether it is working, she replies that the operation is close to being abandoned because it has not produced the desired results. The shift from a forceful threat to a reluctant admission of failure marks the campaign’s central reversal.

The reversal is not that the whales have been subdued, but that the military’s model of their behavior proves inadequate. If the animals are not in control, inflicting pain on them does not necessarily influence the source of their actions. The offensive can therefore become lethal without becoming effective. Li’s own account acknowledges both sides of this failure: the whales remain dangerous, while the navy cannot make them leave except, in her assessment, by killing them.

The practical consequence is that access to the sea remains precarious. Li still hopes to keep the whales away long enough to send down divers or robots, but she does not claim that the offensive has achieved this. Elsewhere in the same crisis briefing, she describes lost drag nets, missing trawlers, storm conditions, and temporary gains against crabs that simply come ashore elsewhere. The sonar effort fits this pattern of costly responses that may delay an immediate danger without restoring control.

Significance

The offensive dramatizes the difference between possessing powerful technology and understanding the system it is meant to control. SURTASS LFA gives the navy a means to impose sound over a wide area, but the existence of that instrument does not provide knowledge of the whales’ motives or of the hidden activity below the surface. The sea is not rendered governable simply because humans can send force into it. In the campaign’s own terms, the loudest response produces neither compliance nor reliable access.

Li’s report also exposes the moral cost built into the operation. The whales’ suffering is acknowledged, but treated as an acceptable instrument of military action; at the same time, killing them is described as the only possible route to the desired result. That choice lays bare how the emergency narrows the available responses while failing to make the underlying danger legible. The sonar offensive is thus an emblem of human power under pressure: technologically forceful, strategically constrained, and unable to distinguish the visible animals from the agency that may be acting through them.