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The License to Take
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Military Grift hub.
The License to Take.
In the law that protects whales and dolphins, 'take' means to harass, injure, or kill. The US military holds a standing federal permit to do it by the million — and the limit that binds everyone else was removed just for them.
Federal law gives the US military a uniquely broad, penalty-free license to harm protected marine mammals: the Marine Mammal Protection Act's 'small numbers' limit was deleted for 'military readiness,' the Navy holds seven-year authorizations to 'take' animals across whole ocean ranges, and the Secretary of Defense can exempt activities outright.
The legal structure graded FACT off the Federal Register and the 2004 NDAA; the viral line 'the military kills millions of animals a year' graded FALSE/MISLEADING — the authorized takes are overwhelmingly harassment, not death.
'Take' includes killing — and the Navy is authorized to do it across four ocean ranges.
The MMPA defines 'take' as 'to harass, hunt, capture, kill or attempt to harass, hunt, capture, or kill any marine mammal.' NMFS issues the Navy (with the Coast Guard, Army, Marines, and Air Force) authorizations to take marine mammals incidental to training and testing — by sonar, explosives, air guns, pile driving — across the Atlantic (AFTT), Hawaii–Southern California (HSTT), the Mariana Islands (MITT), and the Pacific/Indian Ocean (SURTASS low-frequency sonar).
Congress deleted the 'small numbers' limit — but only for the military.
For a normal applicant, the MMPA allows incidental take only of 'small numbers' within a 'specified geographical region.' The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2004 (Pub. L. 108-136) removed both phrases for 'military readiness activities' and rewrote harassment into a two-tier military test (Level A: injury/potential injury; Level B: disruption of natural behaviors). The 2019 NDAA let the authorizations run up to seven years. The cap that constrains everyone else was lifted for the actor with the largest footprint.
The Secretary of Defense can exempt military activities from the law entirely.
The 2004 NDAA also lets the Secretary of Defense exempt any military-readiness activity from the MMPA when necessary for national defense — paralleled by a national-security exemption under the Endangered Species Act. Even the eased rules can be set aside by the department being regulated; legal scholars have flagged it as a rare case of an agency able to write itself out of the statute meant to check it.
The overclaim: 'the US military kills millions of animals a year.'
The number is real but the verb is wrong. The 'takes' authorized across the Navy's ranges run into the millions over their seven-year terms — but the overwhelming majority are Level B harassment (behavioral disruption, temporary hearing effects from sonar and detonations), with a far smaller, defined number of injuries and a limited number of mortalities. The accurate, documented claim is a standing license to HARM marine mammals by the million, deaths included — not millions of kills. We correct the viral version and keep the true one, which is damning enough.
1,428 dolphins shook the world; the standing license barely makes the news.
On September 12, 2021, Faroese hunters drove 1,428 Atlantic white-sided dolphins ashore and killed them — the largest single hunt in the islands' history, part of a grindadrap that brought the 2021 cetacean toll to 2,043. The red water went global: headlines, petitions, calls for a ban. A foreign hunt of ~1,400 animals is a worldwide scandal; a standing US program authorizing harm to marine mammals by the million is a Federal Register line item almost no one reads.
How this page is graded.
- FACT: the MMPA 'take' definition (harass/hunt/capture/kill); the Navy's multi-year authorizations across AFTT/HSTT/MITT/SURTASS; the 2004 NDAA removal of the 'small numbers' and 'specified geographical region' limits for military readiness and the Level A/B harassment redefinition; the SecDef national-defense exemption; and the 2021 Faroe hunt (1,428 dolphins; 2,043 cetaceans) and its global outcry.
- FALSE / MISLEADING (corrected): 'the US military kills millions of animals a year.' The authorized takes are overwhelmingly harassment, not death; an authorization to harm is not proof of harm done. The true claim is a penalty-free license to HARM at that scale, deaths included.
- Carried (the other side): NMFS requires mitigation, monitoring, and a 'negligible impact' finding; sonar and live training have real defense purposes. The argument is about the uniquely broad legal treatment and the silence around it, not that the number should be zero.
Why it matters.
The defense budget is the least-audited part of government, and the harm it is legally permitted to do — to oceans, wildlife, and the ground under its own bases — is the least-counted part of that. It is a Military Grift story (true costs written out of the ledger, sometimes by a law the department can exempt itself from) and a knowledge-control story: a foreign village killing 1,400 dolphins is a moral emergency the whole internet can see, while our own standing permission to harm far more is a document no camera visits. When outrage is that unevenly distributed, someone is deciding where it goes.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenThe exact aggregate of authorized takes across all Navy ranges and years, and the specific mortality sub-totals per rule, pulled from each Federal Register final rule's take tables.
- OpenHow often the Secretary of Defense's national-defense exemption has actually been invoked, and for what.
- OpenIndependent monitoring of realized harm versus authorized harm — how many takes actually occur, and the documented stranding record linked to naval sonar.