By Kathryn Schmidt
Washington File Special Correspondent

Washington -- The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program is making a splash in the Persian Gulf with a unit of dolphins and their handlers who have taken to the waters off the coast of Iraq. Their mission: to clear ports of killer mines.

The deployment to Iraq marks the first time the mine-hunting dolphins have been used in a real-world wartime situation.

Since arriving March 24 at the port of Umm Qasr and several other locations in Iraq, the dolphin teams have unofficially cleared 913 nautical miles of water, investigating 237 mine-like objects, recovering 90 mines and destroying 11 more.

"What is significant here is the large areas which the dolphins can search quickly and report that there are no mines, allowing the search to proceed without the labor-intensive effort of searching every square foot of harbor bottom, literally by hand, to determine if mines are out there," says Tom LaPuzza, Navy public affairs officer for the Marine Mammal Program at the Space & Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, California.

Efficiently detecting mines is even more important when there are thousands of desperately hungry Iraqi citizens waiting for humanitarian aid, notes LaPuzza. "Without the marine mammal teams, clearing a lane for a ship, even a narrow [lane], would have taken many long, careful hours of searching if only [human] divers were doing the work."

LaPuzza tells of one instance when the Royal Navy ship Sir Galahad, filled with tons of food for Iraqi citizens, was floating outside the Iraqi harbor of Um Qasr waiting to make delivery. The marine mammal teams worked swiftly to clear the harbor channel so the Sir Galahad could enter and off-load its humanitarian aid.

Using their biological sonar, dolphins went to work, alerting their human counterparts to anything that looked like a mine while allowing them to bypass areas where there were no mine-like objects. "In that fashion," LaPuzza says, "...it took only a matter of hours to clear a path for the Sir Galahad to get to the pier and unload its food supplies."

There is no doubt that clear ports are vital to the flow of aid to the Iraqi people, and the Navy's marine mammal teams have made this possible in record time.

"Our troops were going in to free a repressed people from a terrible dictator," LaPuzza says. "Humanitarian assistance in the form of a ship full of food [has become] a symbol of the real point of the war, which was about people and not about who had the most missiles and tanks."

Unrivaled by any man-made device, the precise biological sonar of the mine-hunting Atlantic bottlenose dolphins allows them to locate mines and clear areas with unparalleled speed and efficiency. "At more than 100 yards distance, in dark, murky water, a dolphin can easily distinguish between a rock, a small fish, a shark and a discarded boat motor," notes LaPuzza.

In the shallow water of a harbor like Umm Qasr, there are all kinds of noises from boats, waves, pier pilings, and other marine life. Dolphins have the ability to overcome such obstacles of sound reverberation to locate mines.

Dolphins are not the only marine mammals deployed to the Gulf. California sea lions have been participating in training exercises off Bahrain since January, learning to detect and tag enemy divers.

During these "force protection capabilities" exercises, the sea lion alerts a human member of the team when it has spotted a swimmer or diver near a pier or a U.S. Navy ship anchored in the harbor. Then the sea lion attaches a restraining device to the suspicious person and swims away at speeds of up to 25 miles (40 kilometers) per hour. Human counterparts can then drag the suspect to the surface.

The Navy uses sea lions extensively to recover practice mines used in training exercises by Navy divers and dolphins. It is estimated that these exercises save the Navy and taxpayers more than a million dollars annually.

The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program began in 1959 to research hydrodynamics of the dolphin in order to improve torpedo, ship, and submarine designs. Impressed by the dolphins' ability to learn (their level of intelligence is thought to rank between smart dogs and chimpanzees), the Navy began training dolphins, and later, sea lions to perform underwater tasks.

In 1996, dolphin teams were called up to support waterside security at the Republican National Convention in San Diego. Earlier, dolphins were used in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971 to help protect an Army ammunition pier in Cam Ranh Bay from further attacks by North Vietnamese divers.

In 1987 to 1988 dolphin teams were deployed to Manama Harbor in Bahrain to protect the Navy's Sixth Fleet flagship, the USS LaSalle, which was helping direct Kuwaiti tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel that had been mined by Iraq during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

Today, LaPuzza says, the program has a budget of $10 million to $20 million annually, with 75 dolphins and 20 sea lions onboard. He says it takes at least three years to train dolphins in complex behaviors such as detecting mines.

While the Navy does not discuss future operational deployments, LaPuzza says, "as a long-term strategy, it is the plan of the Navy to develop hardware systems that are ... effective enough to replace dolphin systems.".

For the foreseeable future, however, there is no comparable replacement for these mine-hunting teams that have played an integral role in assisting coalition forces, and delivering aid to needy Iraqi people.