The United States Navy Marine Mammal System currently employs bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions in three basic roles: guarding ships and ports against enemy divers, recovering lost hardware, and locating underwater mines. Throughout the program's history, marine mammals have deployed in 25 countries.
Soviet dolphins were fitted with similar antipersonnel weapons...
They also employed dolphins as kamikaze torpedos with remotely triggered explosives, and told Cartlidge that as many as 2,000 dolphins had been killed testing and developing this system. But the most bizarre Soviet marine mammal system was a dolphin paratrooper. A dolphin wore a harness attached to a parachute, and could be dropped from heights up to 3,000 meters. How the dolphin was meant to get out of the harness once in the water, or what its task would be, was not reported.
Sounds like they got a better deal than the Soviet paratroopers who didn't have enough parachutes and thus had to jump from low speed and low altitude into snowbanks.
