The Pentagon increasingly sees the Pacific as its most important theater of operations as tensions brew between the U.S. and China. To that end, the Navy plans to increase training across the vast blue expanse and in Hawaii, home to Pearl Harbor and headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
The Navy has an operating permit through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for what it calls the Hawaii-California Training and Testing Study Area that expires this year. As part of the renewal process, it will have to craft an environmental impact statement that requires providing research and data on the impact on ocean wildlife and continued monitoring.
Whales within in the training area have been a major focus.
NOAA provides 52% of federal funding devoted to whale research, while the Navy is the second largest funder at 26%. The military branch is required by law to support ocean science research around areas it operates in to track both its own impacts and other environmental factors.
The Navy released a draft EIS for public comment in late December on plans to renew its permit. The public comment period ended in January and the Navy is working on the final EIS, which will be reviewed by NOAA.
The draft outlined the Navy’s intention to increase its training around Hawaii and California. The plans call for more live fire, more sonar, more drones and several other new pieces of training. Environmental groups, which say the proposals will harm whales and other marine wildlife if proper mitigation efforts aren’t put in place, are apprehensive.
These plans had already been underway under the administration of President Joe Biden as the U.S. has sought to bolster its Pacific forces. But, ultimately, the final plans — and the actual training — will be under administration of President Donald Trump, which has moved to make aggressive cuts to NOAA and roll back environmental programs across the board.
“This permit is being reviewed in just a dramatically different political climate and legal climate that we, I think, have ever seen in the environmental law world,” said Maxx Phillips, Hawaii and Pacific Islands director and staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“We can’t talk about this EIS without talking about NOAA, because NOAA is supposed to be the check on military overreach,” she argued. “But that oversight only works if NOAA remains a strong, independent, science-based agency. Unfortunately, we’re seeing that role greatly undermined. The current administration has already started gutting NOAA’s capacity by proposing major budget cuts, not allowing them to talk about climate change, slashing staffing and limiting scientific independence.”
Phillips said the change in approach by the new administration has already been stark, with requests for information left unfulfilled or outright ignored.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser made several attempts to speak on the record with members of the Pacific Fleet’s environmental team, which includes marine biologists and program managers. After a series of delays, Navy officials eventually authorized interviews with members of the team for background only and on the condition their names not be used.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his leadership team at the Pentagon have sought to scale back or eliminate initiatives they regard as “woke,” including environmental programs. Hegseth also has pledged to eliminate civilian positions across the Department of Defense, especially any he believes do not “directly contribute to lethality.”
When asked if there are any indications that might include members of the Pacific Fleet’s environmental team, a Navy official said that “unless there’s a fundamental change in the Marine Mammal Protection Act or the Endangered Species Act, … to us right now and for the foreseeable future it’s business as usual until we get told otherwise.”
Phillips claimed that Hegseth’s statements “about removing so-called ‘obstacles to training’ are basically code for gutting hard-won safeguards.”
“And combined with the efforts to weaken NOAA, we’re looking at a very real threat to the few layers of oversight that exist,” she said. “That means this next round of Navy permitting could be even more reckless, less transparent and more damaging than everything that we’ve seen before. It seems very alarmist for me to say that, but it’s true.”
Concerns over sonar
Under the existing permit, Navy personnel operating at sea must acknowledge “mitigation zones” for marine mammals and are instructed that “if marine mammals are observed, Navy personnel must maneuver to maintain distance.” Every ship has a logbook on board, and sailors are supposed to note any sightings of marine mammals near their vessels.
Navy officials said the current iteration of its whale-monitoring program started in 2009, though previous programs existed. The service collects its data by working with scientists from various research institutions who observe and tag whales and track their movements over time, and by asking sailors aboard the vessels to record any animal activity they witness over the course of their duties.
Officials said that in Hawaii, much of the most intensive monitoring is in the vicinity of the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
During exercises, researchers have observed that marine animals tend to move to avoid ships, especially during combat training. But Navy officials say the movements seem to be temporary, with animals returning not long after training stops, indicating that training impacts seem to be short term.
The use of sonar has been particularly scrutinized for its impact on whales and other marine life. Ships and submarines use it to navigate and look for threats hidden in the water around them, but it’s been known to irritate animals, altering their behavior and in some cases even causing physical harm.
In comments submitted to the Navy by Earthjustice in response to the draft EIS, the environmental group argued that “given that species in Hawaiian waters are already vulnerable to noise pollution and behavioral disruptions, even minor increases in sonar activity could have impacts that are not fully accounted for in the assessment.”
Researchers have found beaked whales to be especially vulnerable.
In March 2022, when a beaked whale stranded in Honaunau Bay off the Big Island, bystanders intervened to turn the animal off the rocks, allowing it to swim back out to sea on its own. Local residents reported hearing a siren or alarm type of sound underwater the same day and spotted a Navy vessel nearby the following day.
The Navy later confirmed it used continuous active sonar within 27 nautical miles and 48 hours of the time of the stranding, though officials said the incident has not been definitively linked to sonar.
Military vessels aren’t the only ones whales find themselves interacting with. The ocean can be a crowded place, especially around Hawaii where its waters teem with cargo ships and tankers that keep the state’s economy going and countless recreational boats that frequently encounter marine life.
But Phillips argues that when it comes to the Navy there are unique considerations, and that it is “seeking to ramp up sonar and explosive uses while failing to meaningfully assess or mitigate the true consequences for wildlife. So it’s deeply troubling that the Navy is pursuing these activities under an environmental review that now we are fearful will sidestep key scientific data and downplay long-term harms.”
Environmental threats
In 2021, the Navy launched a review of how its exercises in the Pacific could potentially harm whales, after the Center for Biological Diversity threatened a lawsuit when, unknown to its crew, an Australian navy destroyer dragged two dead fin whales into San Diego under its hull.
For years, Navy officials had insisted sailors would know if they had killed a whale in a collision.
In 2023, the Navy ultimately asked NOAA to amend its current permit to increase its “incidental take” to allow for more whale deaths caused by Navy operations. This year in a legal filing, Navy lawyers also argued that since the two fin whales were killed by an Australian ship rather than an American one, it shouldn’t count toward the U.S. Navy’s incidental take limit.
The current draft EIS did not address potential impacts of foreign navies training in the Hawaii-California Training and Testing Study Area at the U.S. Navy’s invitation, such as the biennial Rim of the Pacific exercises.
The U.S. military has been working to ramp up exercises with its allies as Pacific tensions simmer.
Earthjustice noted the Navy is supposed to look at potential indirect impacts that can be expected to result from U.S. Navy training operations and asserted in its comments on the draft EIS the deaths of the fin whales off San Diego “vividly illustrates the significant impacts that foreign navies participating in HCTT activities can inflict on marine mammals.”
Scientists now believe that whales play a key role in mitigating climate change by storing carbon in their bodies and transporting nutrients that benefit ocean food chains. According to NOAA, current data suggests ocean life captures as much as 31% of all global carbon dioxide emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere that would otherwise continue to trap heat and increase temperatures.
“When biodiversity collapses, we lose the life-support system that makes human civilization possible,” Phillips said. “Biodiversity is strategic infrastructure. Nature is not just this nice thing to have, it’s our invaluable infrastructure. Coral reefs buffer coastlines from storm surges … . Its loss is already reshaping our world, and without urgent action it will just continue to destabilize further.”
Under both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, the military has looked into how environmental threats could become national security threats that would impact their operations. Pentagon leaders have called climate change a “threat multiplier.”
The Navy, in particular, has been interested in oceanography, ecosystems and climate change as rising sea levels and increasingly strong storms affect its bases and operations around the globe. But Hegseth’s team has moved to scale back or eliminate anything related to what he calls “climate crap.”
In April, Navy Secretary John Phelan scrapped the service’s climate action program, declaring in a video posted to the social media platform X that “we need to focus on having a lethal and ready naval force, unimpeded by ideologically motivated regulations.”
Source: The Garden Island
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