Message posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on February 04, 2001 at 09:41:05 EST:
The USN's program using certain marine mammals such as Porpose and seals have been on-going since the sixties. They have been used (during the Vietnam War) as sentries, with rumored successful encounters with underwater sappers. They were equipped with a switchblade-like device attached to the nose of the Porpose. The on-going work mostly deals with seals attaching recovery devices to underwater equipment such as torpedos and practice ordinance. Which the seals perform very well at. Until recently the program was top secret run out of the Floida keys, but also at San Diego and Hawaii. Since the combative portion of the program has been superceded by the recovery aspects, it is light grey instead of the black project it was. The thought of Flipper gutting a VC sapper underwater probably would have not made the military any brownie points during the Vietnam era, so the secrecy was uderstandable. Using animals as weapons is nothing new, during WWII the US experimented using bats as delivery systems for incediary ordinance. During one of the first tests where they were dropped semi-frozen with the mini-bombs attached, they nested in a USAAF hanger and burned it to the ground. So much for that project. Until recently the Soviets and later Russians had a "Dog Mine" listed as an anti-tank weapon. Simply it was a dog trained to run under a tank, with high explosives attached to it. Bow-wow-boom. I hope this answers your inquiry.
In Reply to: TLC program yesterday posted by Mike on February 04, 2001 at 03:47:02 EST:
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