SCOTUS rules for Navy:
The Supreme Court is lifting restrictions on the Navy’s use of sonar in training exercises off the California coast, a defeat for environmental groups who say the sonar can harm whales.
The court, in its first decision of the term, voted 5-4 that the Navy needs to conduct realistic training exercises to respond to potential threats by enemy submarines.
Detecting, classifying, tracking and engaging modern, quiet diesel electric submarines is a significant challenge, made complex by the ever-changing nature of the water column in which they operate. There is no substitute for training on your actual gear, in the actual environment, against actual submarines. And in the mad calculus of deterrent power, demonstrating the capability to do so makes the likelihood of having to do such much lower.
The court, almost surprisingly, deferred to that federal branch dedicated to national security to know what it was doing better than a trial judge or the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals – a bench whose opinions SCOTUS has overturned in eight of ten cases presented before them over the last year. In any other state, such an absurdly high turnover rate would be taken as an explicit professional rebuke. But, alas, this is California.
We take it as a challenge.
I find it highly discouraging that such issues have to be argued in court. And all the way to the Supreme Court, to boot. Common sense is teetering on its last legs. When fundamental training for major combat capabilities has to be argued all the way to the Supreme Court, we’re about at our last resort. Flip the Supreme Court, and there’s no final recourse to common sense of the traditional sort associated with national defense.
Hopefully, this will translate into time for our ASW operators (subsurface, surface, and airborne) against the Gotland.
Important stuff, being able to find out how to deal with the Sterling AIP system considering that a certain Olympics-hosting country seems to like the diesel-air independent propulsion stuff a whole lot.
The Ninth Circuit is sort of the Chicago Cubs of the judiciary. They get it right about as often as the Cubs win the World Series. You’d think those loveable lefties would get tired of being slapped down by the Supremes, but they take their licking and keep on ticking as it were.
One shouldn’t tar them all with the same brush; one of the partners in my old San Diego law firm long ago wound up as Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit–he’s retired now. He was fairly conservative in his judicial philosophy. There are some 25 plus members of the 9th Circuit and a lot of their decisions are made by three judge panels. Not all of them are Stephen Reinhardt (the most “reliably lefty” member of the 9th Circuit). So depending upon which 3 judges happen to be assigned to a particular case, your mileage may vary on the results.
But it is true that the 9th Circuit gets reversed more than any other circuit. And if it’s a Reinhardt written opinion and decision, you can take it to the bank that the Supremes will reverse it. On the other hand, he’s married to Ramona Ripston, the head of the Los Angeles ACLU, so he gets reinforcement at home.
The decision was really 6-3. Roberts wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas. Stevens agreed with the outcome but did not join the majority opinion. Breyer would have allowed some restrictions to remain. Ginsburg and Souter said the prospect of harm (!) to the whales was sufficient to justify limits on sonar use. The opinion is at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-1239.pdf. If you read nothing else, read the syllabus at the beginning. Some great language by Chief Justice Roberts.
Haha!
Fantastic.
I’m all for saving whales and dolphins, as well as other animals, but not at the expense of human lives. This training is crucial to keeping real people alive, and, need I say, free.
I’ve always been astounded that those that protect the rights of the protestors are usually the first to be protested. It’s a weird system, but it’s ours.
I’m glad to see the Supreme Court overturn the decision by the 9th Circuit.
Hurrah! ASW isn’t dead.
The P-3 bubbas haven’t been allowed to do any EER training either if there are mammels chattering about.
A big waste of precious $$ to fly from Whidbey to Sand Diego to play and have to turn around and go home.
ASW is truly an art. The first step in prosecuting an inbound sub it to identify its acoustic signature. The SENSO’s that I flew with never ceased to amaze me with their ability to pull discrete frequency lines out of the mess of noise that is the ocean. Like any other trained skill, if you don’t use it you lose it. Most of the work we did in S-3′s involved passive sonar but without the ability to “go active” when necessary the fight would have been over, contact lost.
If we can do MFA again should we press for unrestricted world wide use of LFA? That would fire up the whalehuggers!
Granting the primacy of national security, surely we can strive for a win-win? 5 minutes or an hour or day before commencing, put out the same tones on broadcast at lower but steadily increasing volume.
Perhaps in our work with marine mammals we have figured out subtler ways of telling them to clear out? But they can certainly be warned off without major issue to the test results. Assuming it works.
Right? We all like Flipper and Shamu and such, don’t we?
In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if sonarmen in the exercise area already conduct just such wildlife warmups. Incremental cost approaching zero to do it, neh?
If you read the SCOTUS summary, you’ll note that the Navy didn’t take issue with four of the six preliminary injunctions imposed. Only two of them created an issue; shutting down active sonars within 2,200 yards of an observed marine mammal, and training during surface ducting conditions.
I think the court struck a good balance, taken as a whole.