Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would neither confirm nor deny this week whether the United States has kamikaze dolphins, a question that landed after fresh scrutiny of military marine mammal programs. His answer left the issue hanging even as Iran’s past interest in dolphins and the U.S. Navy’s own long-running animal program remain part of the debate.
The line from Hegseth was brief and deliberate: he would not “confirm nor deny whether” the United States has kamikaze dolphins. That mattered because the answer came after last month’s report that Iran was considering implementing true kamikaze dolphins, reviving an idea long treated as more rumor than battlefield reality.
There is no indication that Iran has an active dolphin unit in its navy, and Iran does not have an active military dolphin program. But the country did buy dolphins in 2000 for a similar effort, and Russia has used dolphins to guard ports. The result is a topic that sounds outlandish until the history is laid out in order.
The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, has had a dolphin program for almost 70 years and trains bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to detect and recover objects underwater. Scott Savitz said the Navy uses marine mammals to help detect objects underwater and protect ports by detecting intruders. The Navy’s Marine Mammal Program webpage says mines and other potentially dangerous objects on the ocean floor that are difficult to detect with electronic sonar, especially in coastal shallows or cluttered harbors, are easily found by the dolphins.
That mission is also limited. The Navy dolphins are not typically used in active combat environments such as the Strait of Hormuz, and they are brought in to detect mines once fighting has finished. Before the project was declassified in the early 1990s, animal rights activists feared the dolphins were being used as weapons. The program says the animals remain unharmed and are reportedly free to leave whenever they enter open waters for training or operations.
So the answer to the headline question is plain enough: the U.S. Navy does not use kamikaze dolphins. It uses trained marine mammals to search, recover and protect, not to attack.
