Pentagon’s Secret Weapon

This weekend the Guardian released the latest set of secrets contained from the Edward Snowden document drop. While it contained several revelations, perhaps the most disturbing is a secret program called Submarine Hunting Aquatic Response Killer (SHARK) . The program which originated out of the defense departments DARPA office seeks to use various forms of aquatic life operating in their natural habitat to first detect passing submarines, and then destroy them.

The animals are trained to detect passing submarines. It’s unclear how they have trained the animals to determine if the submarine is enemy or friendly, but once identified, the animal uses a head mounted directed energy device to breach the submarine’s hull. Once the sub sinks, and animal is trained to hunt out surviving crew members and then engage them directly with their weapon to minimize the chances that they are able to report what exactly happened.

The first animal that this has been attempted with were great white sharks. Great whites are believed to be a perfect animal for such a weapons platform. Their large size provides ample room to attach the laser weapon too. The fact that they are live continuously under the water (vs whales for example that periodically have to surface to breath) significantly reduces the chances of them being identified. Finally as shown in the dark blue in the map below, their natural hunting grounds cover a significant area of the ocean where both Russian and Chinese submarines could be expected to be located as well as along the American coastline.