When you are in a city that you captured from a enemy, you’re probably going to find mines and booby traps somewhere in some house, so, would it be possible to activate them using a simple long wooden stick or something like that?
Assuming that you’re not a trained engineer, but just a average soldier that has almost no knowledge about mines, what other ways would you have to disable/destroy mines in case you stumble up on one and there are no specialists in vicinity?
Why bother with the stick when you can just press it with your hand? You’ll be just as dead either way.
In computer games, probably. In real life - no chance.
IED’s seem to come in a set of well honed designs. Mostly they are electrically triggered. Poking with a stick is not going to help, one way or another. Booby traps seem to bring out the worst in the imagination of the person setting them. Experience will tell them where to set one for maximum effect, and also how to booby trap the booby trap.
A simple pressure plate design is nothing more than two sheets of foil separated by a layer of foam with a ball bearing in a hole in the foam. Improvisable from scraps. Sure you could set it off with a stick if you knew exactly what it was. Probably blow your hands off and leave you deaf and blind for your trouble. You won’t know where the explosive charge is, it might be concealed in the wall next to you and full of nails. It might be directly under the plate. There might be more than one charge. People setting them will be doing so with an eye to killing disposal specialists as well.
Find one, cordon it off, and don’t be silly.
Mines, booby traps, and IEDs are three very different things. About all they have in common is that they explode.
As FV said, Joe Average soldier is trained to notice them and avoid them. If by some chance you happened to see an antipersonnel mine setting exposed on the ground you could set it off with a stick. As long as your stick is 20 or 30 feet long you’ll probably be uninjured except for the ringing noise in your ears for a week.
Hollywood likes elaborate multi-level booby-traps. Real soldiers or irregulars, not so much. They’re labor intensive to contrive and install. And dangerous while doing so. If you’re busy loosing a battle, you’ve got better things to do than pick one particular house and spend 10 man-hours creating a diabolical undisarmable booby-trap.
I don’t think you realize how big most IEDs are. Poke it with a stick and you will completely cease to exist.
If you are interested, check out the documentary Battle for Marja, which is available on youtube, there is a scene where a marine neutralizes an IED that is one of the most intense things I’ve ever seen, partly because he does it like it’s no big deal.
He might as well be calm–if he screws up, he’ll never know about it.
Sticks ? How low tech. The army does it with det cord, from a safe distance - that’s right, they put their 'splosions in your 'splosions. Most squads have at least one guy carry some as part of their normal package for just that eventuality ; though if there’s no rush and no immediate risk to themselves or civilians (in that order) they’ll typically wait for the real EOD guys.
True that, but man that scene makes me sick to my stomach. Basically, there’s a big ass IED and they’re not sure if the Taliban are watching as they go to disarm it. So he’s going up to deal with it and all the while there could be someone with binoculars waiting to push the button.
When I was an aid worker in Iraq, the insurgents used to leave fake IEDs against our walls We were never sure if it was just to mess with us or a dry run for a real attack. It happened so often that one time when we called the Iraqi police, the cop walked up smoking a cigarette and kicked the fake IED. We were all down the block, not at all ready and about crapped ourselves.
Later in the documentary they show an alleyway that has been set up with a chain of IEDs - about 150 metres long - rigged to be set off together. The intent being to kill everyone in the entire alley. That is taken care of by deliberately setting it off.
Which rather proves the point. Unless you know what you are doing, leave alone.
I think that with potentially dangerous situations in general, “poke it with a stick” is rarely the proper procedure.
It always works sooo well with cobras, badgers, wasp nests, and fire ant nests. So any reasonable person would of course assume it’d work real good on an IED. 
You can activate some with a stick. You’re going to vlow up though, so why would you?
Because you’d prefer that some of the fragments that kill you be made from 100% renewable biomass which performs some degree of carbon capture?
Dunno. Seems a viable solution only if the IED is powered by fruit.
My nephew just finished basic training. He’s a Combat Engineer. Sounds great but the reality is he will be doing “route clearance”. His job is to carry a long pole and lightly poke things to ID IED’s.
He said they told him him IEDs need more than 2.2 lbs of pressure to explode so he has to press at less than 2 lbs.
I looked something like this :eek::smack:, and said “I don’t think they have an approved manual for making IEDs. You be careful.”
He does have 5 more months of training before being deployed so hopefully he will learn a little more!
Paging Tripler to the thread. (Or do I mean Tripolar?)
Tripler. I sent him a PM.
What movie was it they were using the women and children to clear the mines? (Killing Fields?) They wouldn’t use the livestock because that was to valuable.
The TV series Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan ( from 2011), followed bomb disposal teams blowing up and defusing IEDs. It was a great series.