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Ukraine desperate for help clearing mines, says defence minister
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Very naive question - why is it so hard to find landmines?
Why can’t you see the holes where they placed the mines from a helicopter?
Is there no machine that can “see” underground and help locate them?
Is there no way to just spray a bunch of objects in the field and detonate them?
Anti tank mines are buried so after some time they are basically invisible. If they are lucky it might be recently placed (dirt is still visibility disturbed) or places poorly and they can find them.
Anti personal mines are straight up too small to see from the air. Google butterfly mines. Almost impossible to see in some of the dense foliage.
Also flying shit in an active combat zone often gets shot down.
There is metal detectors which are widely used. But very hard to use in a combat zone. Anything bigger would trip the mine.
Speaking of big things triggering it, it also happens to also be a way they clear it. They attach these big disposable wheels to the front of tanks which activates the mines. They are just extremely slow and once again hard to use in an active combat zone.
They do something similar actually, instead it's a huge rope of explosives that blows open a corridor. It gets shot out of a vehicle using rockets. But the amount of explosive used is not cheap so limited supplies and it's also a very dangerous target due to the amount of explosives needed. Some of the biggest explosions I have seen online have been from these mine clearing vehicles.
Land mines are designed to only be found when they go boom.
There are devices and such like designed to do exactly that- but land mines are fundamentally designed to make that not easy. It takes a lot of people, a lot of effort and a lot of time to clear just a single small stretch of field.
They’re also using African pouch rats in places to smell the - and the little fellas are both cute and heroic!
Fair question, to touch on another yet to be mentioned issue landmines can be cheaply made thus used in massive numbers. If there's a field with 5 land mines every sq meter and you remove 80% of the mines you've spent hundreds of collective man hours to create a field you can't move an army through.
Also if you did clear a narrow pathway across it you expose your troops to risk crossing if they exit the cleared path and also you leave behind an entire field of landmines, in your home country that will remain lethal for decades to anyone who wandered in it.
I can only answer the first question about visibility since I read a response previously on it. Basically, the overgrowth moves quick so you can’t see anything with plant coverage pretty quickly. Also rain and snow cover tracks and flatten out the soil that would have been disturbed. Comes down to, can’t see any of them unless you are up close and personal…and even then you need to be trained to spot them. As for blowing them up, they’ve been placed everywhere by the Russians. You can’t explode a few thousand square kilometers (I mean short of doing something crazy).
Plus, a lot of the mines are butterfly mines. Nasty little fuckers right here.
Check out this NGO that works on the problem: https://digger.ngo/