War of the Whales Read Online Free PDF Page A

happy to give first-author credit to his collaborators. His highest-profile publication had been the Baird’s beaked whale chapter in the
Handbook of Marine Mammals
. Balcomb was proud to be included among the PhDs and career academic contributors to that multivolume textbook. But unlike most of his classmates from Santa Cruz, Balcomb never established any institutional affiliation. And because he didn’t complete his PhD coursework, the plum jobs inside academia, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Office of Naval Research remained out of Balcomb’s reach. Not that he could ever have navigated the institutional politics that seemed like Gisiner’s natural habitat. Truth be told, Balcomb couldn’t bear to be indoors for long, much less work at a desk or sit in meetings.
    Gisiner had always been more of an organization man. With so few university-based marine mammal programs nationwide, he didn’t see much of a future in academics. So he went to work for the Navy as a civilian researcher—first training pigeons to locate downed pilots in the Pacific Ocean, and then working with seals in Hawaii and with pilot whales and dolphins at the Navy’s marine mammal training and research center in San Diego. Gisiner’s big promotion came in the midnineties when he was transferred to Washington, DC, to run the marine mammal division at the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
    ONR is the Navy’s great hall of academe. When most people think of the Navy, they conjure images of battleships, aircraft carriers, and submarines. But the combat arm of the Navy—the operating fleet of ships, submarines, and planes—is simply one branch of a massive organizational tree whose roots traverse the uniform and civilian worlds. One of the biggest civilian-staffed branches of the Navy is the Office of Naval Research, a billion-dollar agency spread over naval labs and academic research centers across the country and around the globe.
    The Navy took pride in having been the first of the armed services to establish a world-class research program. By the time World War II ended, it had become clear that knowledge of the oceans was the key to dominating the high seas. US naval strategists understood that the Soviet Union would soon be vying for control of the borderless oceans, and that antisubmarine warfare would become the most critical battle space of the Cold War. To compete in the underwater arena, they embarked on an intensive campaign to recruit the best and brightest marine scientists to the Cold War effort. In 1946 President Harry Truman established ONR to coordinate the nation’s investment in underwater research. Flush with Navy money, small oceanographic institutes such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts metamorphosed from sleepy academic centers into well-funded research labs.
    During the second half of the twentieth century, ONR became the world’s leading funder of oceanographic research, as well as a college catalogue of other scientific disciplines including meteorology, medicine, aeronautics, communications, logistics, engineering, satellite surveillance, nuclear propulsion, ballistics, hydrodynamics, sonar, acoustics, and marine mammal biology—the last being Gisiner’s niche. The Navy had been active in marine mammal research for decades, but during Gisiner’s tenure ONR’s budget in this area tripled. By 2000, he had become the funding czar for marine mammal researchers from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and every latitude in between.
    Somehow Balcomb never found himself downstream from any of ONR’s grants. Not even in the past few years, when ONR felt obliged to fund beaked whale research following a 1996 mass stranding of beaked whales in Greece during NATO naval exercises. When they ran into each other at the recent marine mammal conference in Hawaii, Gisiner gave Balcomb his card, and they agreed to stay in closer