Seek And Destroy

No matter how far technology comes, there are always going to be people who refuse to advance with the times. For every person who is willing to sleep in the street for the chance to buy the new iPhone the day it comes out, there are four or five people who refuse to give up their typewriters for perfectly logical reasons like, "I like the noise the keys make." Now, I'm not making fun of these people - I'm as guilty of this as the next guy because I do not always see the need to have the latest gadget. My phone doesn't run any apps and I'm fine with that, just like I still have not been persuaded to upgrade to a Blu-Ray player (seriously, my regular DVD player does the job just fine). However, this allegiance to out-of-date technology doesn't stop me from occasionally judging others. Every now and again I will come across a story which talks about some program (usually run by the government), making changes and upgrading how they do things and my response is almost never, "That sounds smart." Too often it is more along the lines of, "Wait, why were we still doing things that way?" For example, the other afternoon I came across an article about how the Navy is planning to retire their mine-hunting dolphins and replace them with robots, starting in 2017. There are lot of things happening in that sentence, so let's take them one at a time.

1) The Navy has mine-hunting dolphins. In 2012. Yes, really. In fact, they have 24 of them, with another 60 currently is training. The Navy has spent years teaching dolphins to use their natural low-frequency sonar to swim around, look for underwater mines and then report back when they find one. Allegedly they do a much better job of letting their human trainers know what is below the surface when compared to their robot counterparts, who can't distinguish one hunk of metal from another. I don't quite know where this idea originally came from, but I can only assume someone in the department of defense was a big fan of "Flipper" back in the day and was inspired by an episode.

2) The dolphins will be replaced with robots. I'm not arguing against this part of the story, because it makes tremendous sense. The article never said how long it took to teach these dolphins to identify the mines and alert the human trainers, but I assume it is easier to build a robot than train a dolphin and should the robot screw up you can build an identical one to take its place, rather than start the process again with a new dolphin. I'm just wondering why this hasn't happened before now. Robots have been around for decades. They have been sent to Mars as well as the deepest parts of the ocean. They have also been used to remove roadside explosives in warzones for years. The Navy is just now figuring out they could be used to look for bombs in the oceans? Even if they can't be as accurate as dolphins, at least they don't need to be fed.

3) In 2017. What are we waiting for? I'm sorry, but are there giant sections of the ocean which are off-limits due to their underwater mine fields? I'm pretty sure it isn't 1943 anymore (for some reason I can't stop imagining the people working on this project looking like the cast of "McHale's Navy") and at this point if the Navy hasn't run into a mine, it's a pretty safe bet its because that section of ocean is clear. If there needs to be a gap I feel as though we could take a couple months off and not return to find our shipping lines filled with underwater explosives. The fact that this program cost $24 million dollars and isn't get cut for another 5 years is exactly what is wrong with government spending. These dolphin trainers must have been shocked every day they showed up to work and discovered their funding hadn't been cut yet.

Admittedly, there is no real reason for me to be so amused by this story. Airport Security and several other law-enforcement agencies still use dogs to sniff for explosives and if I found out they were being phased out I would rather surprised. Considering dolphins appear to be the golden retrievers of the sea, the program probably made a lot of sense when it was first adopted. I can only assume this juxtaposition has to do with the fact that I see helper dogs all the time and the only time I see dolphins are when they are jumping through hoops or flipping out of the water, thus making it a little harder to take them seriously. Also, the last few major conflicts have taken place in countries which largely consist of deserts, so the idea we have kept training dolphins when we can't properly armor humvees seems misguided. But I guess the main reason this story caught my eye is that using dolphins to hunt for underwater mines seems like the kind of idea which was fine for the time, but should have been replaced well before now. I'm so used to the idea of technology automatically taking the place of most things that I am surprised when people keep using antiquated ideas, no matter how effective they may still be. Still, something tells me the Navy won't be going back to using Morse Code anytime soon.