U.S. policy of attacking whales with sonar

The U.S. policy of attacking whales with sonar turns an ecological emergency into a military campaign against marine animals. Authorized by Judith Li as a way to reopen the waters to human activity, the offensive assumes that whales can be driven away by force. Its central contradiction emerges as the policy is put into practice: officials suspect that the whales are not acting under their own control, yet direct an increasingly harmful weapon at them, and later concede that the attack is not working.

Emergency Measures and the Decision to Attack

The sonar offensive forms part of Judith Li’s broader response to a crisis that has made vessels vulnerable and coastal waters dangerous. Her proposed measures extend beyond whales: she calls for the coastline to be closed, drone patrols along the shores, and troops equipped to destroy organisms that crawl out of the sea. At the same time, she wants vessels to sail wherever they choose, framing unrestricted movement as a test of whether the whales can be made to yield.

Her policy toward the whales is not conservation or deterrence through avoidance. Li rejects animal-protection concerns and proposes hunting them down, treating them as a force that must be punished. She then specifies the means: rather than shooting the animals directly, the campaign will use sonar and continue until they leave the waters in peace. That distinction does not make the strategy nonviolent. It shifts the attack from visible weapons to a sustained acoustic assault intended to inflict severe harm on the whales’ hearing.

The policy’s justification is inseparable from a larger question of control. In reporting the crisis, officials describe marine animals as being directed by an unseen intelligence, and Li argues that the United States must respond to that control with force of its own. The sonar campaign therefore targets whales both as immediate hazards and as presumed instruments of an adversary. Yet this account also makes the policy’s moral and practical problem plain: if the whales are not in control of their actions, harming them cannot address the source of the threat.

How the Offensive Is Supposed to Work

The planned weapon is SURTASS LFA low-frequency active sonar. Li’s defense of the system is blunt: the intention is to overwhelm the whales with sound, deafen them, and keep increasing the volume until they can no longer continue their attacks. This is presented as a response to the marine threat, not as an effort to understand why whales are behaving abnormally or to distinguish among animals and circumstances.

The operational logic is also tied to human access to the sea. Officials explain that if the whales can be kept away even temporarily, divers and underwater robots may have a better chance of being deployed. Sonar is thus meant to clear a path for investigation and intervention beneath the surface as well as to reduce danger to vessels. The policy treats the animals’ presence as an obstacle to human operations, while the loss of access to the water is itself evidence of how little control those operations retain.

That logic sits within a wider campaign against the marine crisis. Officials describe efforts to remove worms, place nets in coastal waters, and use other containment measures, while acknowledging that creatures can simply appear elsewhere. They also lay out a five-step account of the expanding threat, from removing human presence from the waters to attacks on coastal populations, infrastructure, and cities, ending in a potentially uninhabitable climate. The sonar offensive is one immediate tactic within this emergency response, not a demonstrated solution to the broader sequence of dangers.

Results and Reversal

The campaign does not produce the result Li sought. In a later account, she says that officials are close to giving up because the offensive has not achieved its intended effect. The whales do not flee from the sound as an animal with ordinary freedom of action might. Li says they appear to be in terrible pain but have no choice, and that they continue to terrorize the waters. The policy’s own report therefore undermines the assumption on which its coercive logic depends: escalating the attack does not compel the whales to retreat.

The failure does not mean that the offensive has immediately ended. Li tells Leon Anawak that it is still under way, while admitting that it has not worked as hoped. The stated remaining value is temporary: if the whales can be kept away for a time, divers or robots might be sent down. The sonar strategy has thus shifted, in her account, from a force expected to resolve the whale threat to a possible short-lived opportunity for other operations.

This change exposes a gap between the policy’s public posture of mastery and its practical limits. The government seeks to reclaim the sea by force, but its own assessment describes animals that endure the assault without withdrawing, while the underwater work remains dependent on a brief and uncertain opening. The campaign can inflict harm without establishing control.

Significance

The sonar policy makes the crisis’s central conflict visible in miniature: human institutions interpret dangerous marine behavior as an enemy action and answer it with weapons, even when their own account suggests that the animals may be controlled by something beyond themselves. The whales become both targets and evidence of a hidden force. That ambiguity does not restrain the response; instead, it helps turn ecological uncertainty into a rationale for military escalation.

The policy’s failure also complicates the claim that force will restore human command of the ocean. Its aim is to clear waters for ships and researchers, but the attempt cannot make the whales leave, and officials describe the animals as suffering without being able to choose their response. The episode contrasts the authority implied by an offensive with the helplessness contained in its results. The sea remains beyond the reach of the campaign’s intended control, while the cost of that failure falls on the creatures selected as its targets.