Real gorilla warfare

Faster than lightning. No one you see is smarter than he. He's an army of one dorsal fin and one high-tech laser gadget fastened to a flipper, by which he got his name: Laser. He's a Navy Dolphin, tried and true, and he's deployed in Iraq to help his fellow soldiers whenever duty calls.\nBefore any seaborne humanitarian aid can arrive at the port of the southern Iraqi city of Umm Qasar, the coalition forces must clear their suspicions of underwater mines in the area. Yet with all of the advances in technology being employed in this conflict, laser guided missiles and matriarchal bombs, our armed forces are turning their eyes back toward nature, asking everyone's favorite rubbery mammal to assist in their endeavors.\nA part of the Navy's Marine Mammal Program, these dolphins receive extensive training and sweep the bottom of the Gulf for mines, marking what they find for disposal. \nMSNBC.com spoke with a spokesman for the Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain, Lt. Josh Frey, who noted that the dolphins are more naturally suited for underwater mine detection than humans are.\n"In shallow water environments like the North Arabian Sea and its ports and bays, there is a lot of man-made and biological noise," he explained. "The capability that mammals bring to de-mining efforts is that they have a very sophisticated form of biological sonar … to help them avoid predators and find food. These natural adaptations make the mammals valuable to Navy human personnel."\nWhere man has tried to improve and improve alone, only Mother Nature has been able to perfect. It truly places our egos in perspective when we marvel at the near-perfect accuracy of our Tomahawk missiles, but realize that with keen vision and senses of the animal kingdom, we may never miss our marks.\nFrey continued to describe other facets of the Navy's program, revealing that sea lions have been deployed in Bahrain for "force protection."\n"What they are trained to do is detect and locate threat swimmers or divers who might be trying to cause harm to a coalition vessel, port or harbor," he said. "They would do this by attaching a restraining device to the swimmer or diver, and a line floats to the surface that marks their location, so they can be immediately apprehended by human security force personnel and questioned."\nIt appears that there is a host of resources available to us in the field of animal warfare, and though Arafat's suicide donkey bombing missions aren't the most sophisticated evolutions of the idea, you can't fault the innovation. It requires a much brighter imagination to discover some actually effective expansions of the project.\nNow we have dolphins scouring the sea for mines. Tomorrow we may have prairie dogs tunneling to find al Qaeda's caves, tree-frogs manufacturing chemical weapons and if we can't find Osama, let Bigfoot and the Chupacabra handle it. They seem to know all the good spots. \nAnd as for the animal rights activists claiming that the use of dolphins for what seems to be a dangerous task is unethical, I offer this: They say that dolphins may possibly be the smartest animals in the world, directly after humans. Would you like to know why they are only second?\nBecause they're the ones out there in the underwater mine fields, while I'm using my two legs to walk away and buy a tuna sandwich.