US Navy floods 80 percent of global oceans with 235 decibels
By Miriam Adler ·
Whales and dolphins face noise 200 billion times the disturbance threshold while the US Navy lets its own contractor write the environmental impact statement.
235 decibels. That is the intensity of the sound the US Navy intended to pump into 80 percent of the world's oceans. For those unfamiliar with the logarithmic scale of sound, the figure is not merely a technical specification; it is a physical assault. According to a program description mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, this Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar system is designed to detect "quiet submarines" by flooding the deep with sound waves between 100 and 1000 Hz, frequencies capable of traveling vast distances through the water.
To a medical ethicist, the LFA program reads as a global experiment conducted without a single subject's consent. The ocean is treated not as a living ecosystem, but as a vacant room to be filled with noise for the sake of strategic advantage. The Navy’s objective is the detection of slow, diesel submarines in shallow water—a threat that became more "salient" as regional conflicts shifted away from the deep-water Cold War paradigms. But the cost of this detection is an auditory environment transformed into a weapon.
235 Decibels
The scale of the noise is staggering. The FAS record notes that the LFA system uses "intense sound," reaching levels of 235 decibels or greater. While the Navy attempted to soften this figure, suggesting a level of 160 dB at a distance of two kilometers from the source, the peak output remains a violent reality. The Natural Resources Defense Council charged that these levels would expose marine mammals to noise pollution "200 billion times greater" than the threshold known to disturb them.
This is not a theoretical concern. By the time the FAS summary was updated in 1997, the Navy had already tested the LFA for over 7,500 hours, with approximately 25 tests conducted across several oceans since 1988. These were not cautious probes; they were the precursors to a permanent deployment. The goal was to move beyond passive SURTASS towed array sonars, which the Navy found limited in their ability to find the quietest hulls. The LFA offered the potential for longer-range detections, provided the Navy was willing to ignore the biological fallout of such a scream.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
The Cory Chouest
To bridge the gap between development and deployment, the Navy utilized a leased ship, the Cory Chouest, as a fleet asset to validate these technologies. This was the interim step before the arrival of the TAGOS 23, the first dedicated LFA ship, which was already under construction at the time of the record. The plan called for four dedicated vessels split between the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets.
Underpinning this effort was a suite of high-performance computing designed to parse the "complex propagation, high clutter, and low target Doppler" of shallow waters. The Navy developed a Hybrid Digital/Optical Processor (HyDOP) to handle computationally intensive algorithms that conventional processors could not manage in real time. This system paired a high-speed optical correlator from the Naval Research Laboratory with an Intel Paragon XP/S-25 computer. It is a chilling marriage of high-end mathematics and brute force; the more sophisticated the processor, the more efficiently the Navy could track a target through a sea of its own artificial noise.
No Standing to Sue
When the environmental cost of LFA was raised, the Navy’s response was a masterclass in institutional avoidance. The FAS record notes that the Navy agreed to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the program, due in August 1997. However, the document contains a detail that should alarm anyone concerned with objective oversight: the EIS was "being written by the contractor for the system." Asking the manufacturer of a weapon to document its environmental damage is not an audit; it is a marketing exercise.
This pattern of dismissing non-human suffering reached its legal zenith in the courts. The FAS file references a ruling in The Cetacean Community v. George W. Bush, decided on October 20, 2004. In that case, an appeals court ruled that cetaceans—the whales and dolphins whose primary sense is the very medium the Navy was polluting—do not have standing to sue the government to challenge the use of SURTASS/LFA.
By stripping the victims of legal standing, the state ensured that the noise could continue unabated. The record leaves us with a picture of a Navy that successfully merged cutting-edge optical processing with a legal framework that renders the biological world invisible. The question that remains is not whether the LFA can find a submarine, but what happens to a species when its entire world is rendered an echo chamber of 235 decibels.