At a Pentagon press briefing Tuesday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked to respond to reports that Iran may be using mine-carrying dolphins in the Strait of Hormuz against U.S. ships.
The topic may sound like outrageous science fiction – but the history behind the question is a lot stranger.
“I can’t confirm or deny whether we have kamikaze dolphins, but I can confirm they don’t,” Hegseth said, before addressing the bigger ongoing situation in the strait. “Ultimately, any follow-on effort, if there are mines identified, would be something that some of our units could undertake, or the world could undertake. But right now we know we have a lane of safe passage that commercial shipping can flow through.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine also quipped that he hadn’t heard the reports and likened the idea to “sharks with laser beams” – a reference to the 1997 comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Iran has laid a spattering of mines in the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global oil shipments, and officials estimate it could take months to find and remove them.
According to a report published by The Wall Street Journal, Iranian officials have also considered a range of unconventional military options, including submarines and even, yes, mine-carrying dolphins.
Dolphins as Weapons? The History of America’s Underwater Military Program
The idea of utilizing dolphins in military operations is a real strategy, and has been an official U.S. government policy for over six decades.
According to the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, the Navy has trained bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions since 1959, with its program headquartered at Point Loma in San Diego. The Navy Marine Mammal Program was even specifically created to train animals to detect, locate, and mark underwater objects – primarily mines – in harbors, coastal areas, and the open sea.
The reason dolphins are uniquely suited for this work, per the Navy’s own website, is that bottlenose dolphins possess the most sophisticated biological sonar known to science. Mines that are nearly invisible to electronic sensors in shallow or cluttered waters are easily found by dolphins. They can also dive hundreds of feet without risking decompression sickness, which humans are prone to, and their low-light vision allows them to work in dark or murky conditions.
The program has been used in real military operations, staying classified for decades, and has reportedly produced more than 1,200 scientific studies. That secrecy led to years of speculation – boosted by the 1973 film “The Day of the Dolphin” – that the animals were being trained as weapons.
Since the program was declassified in the early 1990s, the Navy has said dolphins are used only for detection and recovery work. But as the program’s official website states, “rumors are not easily forgotten.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed, its dolphin training program eventually passed to Ukraine – and when funding dried up, the Ukrainian trainer allegedly sold his dolphins to Iran in 2000 because he couldn’t afford to feed them, per Military.com. “I cannot bear to see my animals starve,” trainer Boris Zhurid told a Russian newspaper at the time.
K-9 Corps: America’s Most Loyal and Longest-Serving Military Heroes
No animal, however, has served the U.S. military more than the dog.
According to the Army, the formal War Dog program officially launched on March 13, 1942, when the Quartermaster Corps stood up what became informally known as the K-9 Corps. The program used about 11,000 dogs, training them as sentries, scouts, messengers, and mine detectors.
In Vietnam alone, roughly 4,000 dogs and 9,000 handlers were deployed, and the United States War Dogs Association estimates they helped save more than 10,000 American lives.
Today, at least 1600 dogs serve on active duty worldwide, with the majority trained at the 341st Training Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
Pigeons Guiding Bombs and Bat Incendiaries: WWII’s Strangest Flying Weapons
During World War II, the government funded military programs that experimented with flying animals.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology documented its own involvement in “Project Pigeon,” in which behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner trained pigeons to guide glide bombs by pecking at a screen displaying the target. The National Defense Research Committee funded the effort before canceling it in 1944, when an electronic guidance system for glide bombs proved more reliable.
Less well-known is the bat bomb program, approved by President Roosevelt in 1942.
A Pennsylvania dentist proposed attaching small incendiary devices to hibernating bats and dropping them over Japanese cities, where they would roost in wooden structures before the bombs detonated, according to the National Parks Service. One early test accidentally burned down part of the Carlsbad Army Airfield in New Mexico. That program was later shelved when the atomic bomb became the priority for military researchers.
