Fuck the whales, we've got North Korean submarines to worry about

The New York Times has an article by Adam Liptak about the Supreme Court ruling on the Navy's use of sonar:

Courts have no business second-guessing the military, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in lifting restrictions on submarine training exercises off the coast of Southern California that may harm marine mammals. In balancing military preparedness against environmental concerns, the court came down solidly on the side of national security. “The lower courts failed properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by four other justices, wrote for the court in the first decision of the term. For the environmental groups that sought to limit the exercises, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of marine mammals that they study and observe.” By contrast, he continued, “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens, concurred, saying the lower courts had not adequately explained why they had rejected the Navy’s contentions. But Justice Breyer, writing only for himself on this point, said he would have imposed more limited restrictions.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice David H. Souter, dissented.
Chief Justice Roberts emphasized the importance and difficulty of sonar training exercises. The nation’s adversaries, he said, possess at least 300 diesel-electric submarines that “can operate almost silently, making them extremely difficult to detect and track.”
So-called mid-frequency active sonar, which emits pulses of sound and receives acoustic echoes back, is effective at finding enemy submarines, the chief justice said, but only if sonar operators have become proficient in its use. He said the amount of harm to marine mammals by the exercises is sharply disputed, noting that the Navy asserted that there has not been “a single documented sonar-related injury to any marine mammal” over 40 years of similar exercise off the California coast.
Whatever the correct answer to how many animals would be harmed, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, those injuries are “outweighed by the public interest and the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors.”