perfidy

Our US Navy and other Pacific forces have been on a tear lately.

That's "tear", like what our stuff does to our enemies' asses, and not "tear", which is what falls from hippies' eyes when we do it.

Following on the heels of recent Ministry coverage of exciting and dangerous Pacific developments here and here, not to mention massive training exercises covered here and here, comes news that the Navy is more determined than ever to show how deep a bench it brings to the game.

Sure the Navy already brings the great big warships and a muscular aviation branch. But it goes without saying that all those pilots and sailors are at least human. The Navy's so bad, it has other species working for it. Some might argue that the Navy already had another species working closely with it, the Marines. But for all their evident and obvious badassitude, Marines are mostly human. And while the Air Force sends in the big bombers and the nukes and the orbital death rays, those too are piloted or directed by people. (With the notable exception of previous experiments) .

Included in recent Pacific exercises were America's battle mammals, the Navy's Marine Mammal Program. Dolphins. Sea Lions. Perhaps, someday, even ambitious otters. They work in teams to find mines- dolphin locates the mine through its echolocation; sealion swims down to attach a marker or retrieval line. They are also trained at finding enemy swimmers, sitting on and drowning them, or stoving in their ribcages with their armored battlesnouts.

Not surprisingly, hippies had something to say to rain on everyone's parade:

"These animals are highly sensitive, deeply intelligent creatures, and to use them for warfare is to abuse them," said Wayne Johnson, who is on the board of Animal Rights Hawaii. "These animals need to swim free."

But they ARE swimming freely- they freely swim 100 fathoms into the briny deep to find mines, or freely swim as they patrol a harbor. And I'll tell you something else, just because a species is intelligent it doesn't follow that it then must be averse to war. Humans invented war, and prosecute it enthusiastically. And I'd love to know how he knows that our interspecies allies are "highly sensitive". Because I don't think he means sensitive by virtue of super-attenuated senses; I think he means in the sense of prefering Emily Dickinson to Too $hort. And that's just goofy, because he obviously has not spent much time with them.

All of the ministers have worked to some extent with our dolphin allies. Johno and Buckethead have written on cetacean history, and I was a minor functionary in the first Inter-Species Defense Council so many years ago. Between meetings and plenty of fresh mackerel, I found dolphins to have not only a compelling sense of duty, but a very grim sense of humor. Sure they seem to laugh and enjoy themselves at Sea World, but that's only because they know that a quick flip of their tail could break any human neck, or a short burst of speed can turn their whole body into a torpedo. They laugh at us, not with us, and think that drowning an enemy combat swimmer is really quite hilarious. As a matter of fact, dolphins are probably among the least sensitive of the swimming species, at least regarding the fate of homo sapiens. They assist us out of their own self interest.

Nevertheless, they still train with our forces as we continue to refine inter-species doctrine and planning.