The Supreme Court rules for the Navy in a dispute over the use of sonar:
Courts must be wary of second-guessing the military’s considered judgments, the Supreme Court said Wednesday in lifting judicial restrictions on submarine training exercises off the coast of Southern California that may harm marine mammals.Roberts' reasoning is kind of interesting from a national security perspective; he argued that sonar practice is necessary to the perfection of anti-submarine doctrine, and the existence of 300 diesel electric submarines worldwide makes anti-submarine capability necessary. The second proposition is a bit more debatable than the first (it's well established that the development and execution of doctrine requires practice), as the raw number of foreign submarines doesn't tell us all that much about the likelihood of said boats being used in war against the USN. Moreover, it's not quite right to say that diesel-electrics are all very quiet; modern diesel electric submarines are, but older types will probably be detectable through passive sonar. Only active sonar ("Give me a ping, Vasili") endangers the whales. That said, it's certainly correct that the United States Navy could come into combat against advanced, very quiet diesel electric submarines, and that the use of active sonar would be necessary in such an eventuality. Roberts also wrote that “military interests do not always trump other considerations, and we have not held that they do. In this case, however, the proper determination of where the public interest lies does not strike us as a close question”; it would be nice to have a clearer idea of what a close question would be.In balancing military preparedness against environmental concerns, the majority came down solidly on the side of national security.
“The lower courts failed properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by four other justices, wrote for the court in the first decision of the term.
For the environmental groups that sought to limit the exercises, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of marine mammals that they study and observe.” By contrast, he continued, “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.”
Galrahn has much more detail.
--Robert Farley
