Operation Dolphin 2012: Underwater Humanitarian Mission

Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP) bottlenose dolphins are trained to locate potentially hazardous explosives using echolocation—their biological sonar. National Geographic notes that dolphins “can make up to 1,000 clicking noises per second. These sounds travel underwater until they encounter objects, then bounce back to their dolphin senders, revealing the location, size, and shape of their target.”
Upon locating an item of interest, a NMMP dolphin is trained to drop a marker near the object and return to the handler. Divers then swim down to confirm and videotape the hazardous object marked by the dolphin. In the Bay of Kotor deployment, the dolphins marked artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, landmines and sea mines and aerial bombs with exceptional accuracy. To date, no Navy marine mammal has been a casualty in any peacetime exercise or during a conflict.
The “Dolphin 2012” mission, so named by the Montenegrin Navy, was initiated by the United States State Department and US Embassy Podgorica’s Defense Attaché Office.

The Bay of Kotor, hemmed in by mountains off the Adriatic Sea in Montenegro, is a pristine paradise where the air is fresh and clear. Medieval villages, cathedrals, monasteries, palaces, and castles beautify its shores. Montenegrins fish, swim, and scuba dive in the calm blue bay. Cruise ships, freighters, and recreational boats navigate its waters. On the surface, all seems serene, idyllic. But beneath its surface lie the remnants of the deadly weapons of modern warfare, still dangerous decades later.

This bay needed resuscitating, and so last October, after forming a multi-national team in cooperation with the Republic of Montenegro, the United States government brought in its top performers to complete the first joint underwater mission with the Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP): to locate on the bay’s floor explosive remnants of war from the Yugoslav wars of the mid-1990s and the World Wars.

Six bottlenose dolphin mine hunters, equipped with biological sonar, and their entourage of marine mammal trainers, handlers, Navy divers, veterinarians, boat drivers, Air Force pilots, and crews flew 20 hours in a C-17 Globemaster III from San Diego to Tivat, Montenegro.

The dolphins and their teams, who usually operate with little public fanfare, made a big splash in the country when they were driven in open-bed trucks from the airport through the villages to the bay.

“Everyone was lined up along the streets, waving, cheering,” recalled Jaime Kennemer, head trainer of three of the dolphins. “I felt like we were a parade.”

Montenegro, whose population is around 660,000, is a country without Sea Worlds, aquariums, or zoos, so its people were captivated by the highly-trained dolphins who explored their bay over the next three weeks in search of hazardous explosive remnants.

The dolphins mapped out the bottom of large parts of the winding bay — nearly 2.5 million square metres — alongside their trainers and diving crews. They located “around 20 individual ordnance-like items and about 10 clusters of what appeared to be artillery shells,” said Bob Olds, the NMMP’s Business Manager, in an email after the mission was completed. “At least one of the items dates back to World War I.”

One of Kennemer’s dolphins flagged the World War I aerial bomb, which was overgrown with sea life. Her dolphin team also flagged the clusters of artillery.

“This, for me, was the really big thing, when I took my animals out and saw them do well at the real thing,” Kennemer said, who’s been involved in numerous exercises since joining NMMP in 2000, but never on a live mine hunting venture.

Dolphin 2012 was also the first overseas deployment for Chris Trainor, a contractor who has been training dolphins for 11 years and working for NMMP since 2010. His dolphin was one of the youngest.

“He excelled when we got there,” Trainor said. “He’s a very brave dolphin, one of the first to get out there to explore the whole bay. He never got scared, never went home before we did,” back to the water pens by the docks, the dolphins’ temporary homes in the bay

Trainor said their dolphins never swam off into the open ocean. In fact, the crew never even saw dolphins in the wild during the expedition. “They identify with us. We’re their homes, their friends, they seek our attention,” he explained. “They stay with our boats. They love to swim around and explore, but they won’t run off into the wild blue yonder.”

While the dolphins worked one- to three-hour shifts each day, their human counterparts regularly put in 8 to 10 hours a day in the bay, a few times until sunset. One afternoon, when they had a rare few hours of daylight to spare, Trainor took his dolphin out near the bay’s narrow mouth that led to the sea. The group pulled their boats alongside the mountains to explore the abandoned bunkers tunneled out by the former Yugoslav Navy that once hid its submarines inside them in wartime.

“I was at the Bay of Kotor, looking out at the Adriatic Sea,” Trainor recalls, “an abandoned submarine cave on my left, tossing a ball with my dolphin on my right, tiny European villages all around … Where in life do all these things line up?”

Braden Duryee, NMMP’s Operations Supervisor, was particularly struck by the camouflaged military bases dug in the mountains and the history behind them. He also enjoyed the people and culture.

“Montenegro is a beautiful country—a hidden gem,” Duryee said. “I love their pace of life. I think they could teach us all a lesson on how to enjoy what you have.”

Chris Harris, a NMMP team member who primarily handled public affairs in Montenegro, helped spread the mission’s message, encouraging environmental stewardship in and around the Bay of Kotor. Hundreds of school children observed the dolphins and their teams from shoreline and the piers, and over 2,000 came out for Media Day.

“We taught them about the dolphins and how to be good stewards of the ocean,” Harris said.

Lt. Col. Brad Curtis, an aircraft commander who was one of the four pilots from a March Air Reserve Base squadron in Riverside, California, flew the dolphins and crew home to San Diego. The veteran of the two Gulf Wars, whose missions over his 26-year career have often been to bring wounded soldiers home from overseas, was honored to be a part of such an unusual mission.

“Your heart is broken for the soldiers that are wounded. You’re glad to take them to safety and better care,” Curtis said about his other missions. “But this was different from every cargo I’ve carried. It was very exciting. It was nothing but helping people, a humanitarian effort to clear their waters.”

There will be follow-up missions to continue training Montenegrin Navy divers “to identify and safely recover and/or dispose of explosive remnants of war,” according to the Defense Department’s HMA program. Plans are also underway for more overseas underwater missions for the dolphins and their crews, contingent, says NMMP Business Manager Bob Olds, on “identifying countries with the need for our unique capabilities.”

At the end of the Dolphin 2012 operation, a graduation ceremony was conducted for the Montenegrin Navy divers. US Ambassador to Montenegro Sue K. Brown, Montenegrin Navy Lieutenant-commander Predrag Supic, and US Navy Lieutenant Junior Grade Jeffrey Pitts presided over the ceremony. Grids with the precise locations of hazardous items were provided to the Montenegrin Ministry of Defense via the Defense Attach Office. A US mine program donated diving equipment to enhance the capacity of the Montenegrin Navy to conduct underwater operations, potentially including continued missions to clear the Bay of Kotor.

p. Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP) bottlenose dolphins are trained to locate potentially hazardous explosives using echolocation – their biological sonar. National Geographic notes that dolphins “can make up to 1,000 clicking noises per second. These sounds travel underwater until they encounter objects, then bounce back to their dolphin senders, revealing the location, size, and shape of their target.”

Upon locating an item of interest, a NMMP dolphin is trained to drop a marker near the object and return to the handler. Divers then swim down to confirm and videotape the hazardous object marked by the dolphin. In the Bay of Kotor deployment, the dolphins marked artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, landmines and sea mines and aerial bombs with exceptional accuracy. To date, no Navy marine mammal has been a casualty in any peacetime exercise or during a conflict.

The “Dolphin 2012” mission, so named by the Montenegrin Navy, was initiated by the United States State Department and US Embassy Podgorica’s Defense Attach Office.>

Cheryl Spainhour is a senior lecturer in communication studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Peace Magazine Jul-Sep 2013

Peace Magazine Jul-Sep 2013, page 24. Some rights reserved.

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