So they’re training the giant rat of Sumatra, or a close cousin, to sniff out landmines.
Cool.
Why not just drive a steamroller, with appropriate shielding for the driver, over the entire minefield and set off all the mines, rather than try to detect them and then engage in what must be a delicate and dangerous effort at removing them without triggering the explosive charge?
They have something like that already…
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/hydrema-pics.htm
Cool – thks.
Brute force – always a winner.
You mean like this.
I am not an EOD tech but have worked with them clearing other types of ordnance - My guess is that the flail does not work well enough. Blowing up mines does not necessarily destroy adjacent ones but can scatter those nearby. Same thing with explosive charges which can clear a lane for troops to advance but not find and eliminate the ordnance.
When EOD clears a site all metallic objects are identified and dealt with.
I would also guess that not all mine fields are flat plains that are friendly to vehicles. If you’re dealing with mines placed in wooded areas, or rugged and mountainous terrain, you’d need small tools such as people, dogs and rats.
There’s another one called the Minecat 230. I photographed a story in Kosovo for Car and Driver in June 2000 for, I believe, the February or March 2001 issue of C&D.
Basically, these flail-type minesweepers dig over terrain and eliminate about 99% of mines, and are able to withstand both anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. The way the mission in Kosovo and other places were set up, the Minecat would roll over terrain, get rid of most of the nasties, and then they would send in mineclearing personnel to do a final, manual sweep. For military purposes, a 99% sweep was good enough, but for civilian purposes, they still had to send in actual people to officially declare an area cleared.
As to how the Minecat could miss detonating a mine every so often wasn’t made clear to me.
Way back in the Old Silurian Age of WWII, the US Army in Normandy cobbled uptanks with a rotating drum with chains attached as flails for mine clearing.
I’ve got that article around here somewhere! Tres cool!
I checked their site, but the only article I could find which mentioned Kosovo was the test drive of the uparmored Humvee.
Cool! We’ve done a few fun things for C&D, including the South Africa anti-carjacking squad, German autobahn police, some amphibious vehicle thing, and a couple others. Check em out.
Since (IIRC) you were personally involved in D-Day (weren’t you in a B-26 flying above the beaches pre-invasion?), this nitpick is offered with the utmost of genuine respect:
[nitpick]
Whereas the basic tank in the photo in your link is obviously a Sherman (i.e. US), it’s identified in the text as part of the British 79th Armoured Division. The “Crab” (mine-destroying flail) modification to the US Sherman was one of the ground-breaking designs of Major General Sir Percy Hobart, who led the 79th.
“Hobart’s Funnies” also included the DD (Duplex Drive) “swimming tank”, the “Bobbin” attachment to the front of a Churchill tank to allow it to lay its own path across the beach, allowing other vehicles to follow without getting bogged down, the “Crocodile” flame-thrower tank, and various tanks with bridge-laying equipment attached.
According to this link, the “Crabs” were not used by US forces on D-Day.
The main US-developed “Mine Exploder” tank was the T1E3 ‘Aunt Jemima’ modification to the Sherman (so named because its huge mine-exploding disks looked like pancakes!), but that was apparently very hard to maneuver, and was replaced in US forces by the Hobart-designed “Crab”.
This site says:
[/nitpick]
[Since I don’t think I’ve ever posted a reply to you before, David Simmons, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you and all of your colleagues for your service and sacrifices in those dark days]
Sorry for the, er, hijack, but I just wanted to say that that one about the SA police anti-carjacking squad was one of the best (and saddest) articles I’ve ever read in a car mag.
Carry on.
I am a bit of an expert in the subject. (Don’t ask, a misspent youth.)
Short version, an AT mine will rubble any sort of dozer blade on the first blast. Several AP mines will do the same.
Mines cost a few bucks, bulldozers cost tens of thousands. ‘A minefield’ might be a couple of tow-poppers, but more likely we are talking about a few thousand mines, or a hundred times that in a mine belt. How many bulldozers you want to bring?
Bottom line, it is much easier and cheaper to screw up an area with mines than it is to clear it.
Consider that not all minefields are in nice open fields. How is your dozer going to get in next to walls, rocks and fences? ‘Oh,’ you say ‘we’ll just dozer down the wall to get the mines.’
You ever hear about ‘destroying the city to save it?’ You tell the locals your plan (and then stand back). Same with any plan to detonate mines in place mechanically.
(People plant mines in the silliest places, your dozer can’t get to them all.)
Next consider the ‘windrow effect,’ There are darn few mines per fortnight in a minefield. When you use a dozer you might not set off each mine, some will be pushed to the side, where they will have a greater density (measured in foot-candles) than the field itself. You just push all the nasty into one place.
‘Well,’ you say ‘close enough for government work.’ Not so, people need to know ALL the mines are gone. 99.99% is not good enough. Some poor kid will find that 0.01$ with his foot in a month or so and all economic life in the area will stop as people stick to the roads again.
A few mines left are fine in military ‘mine breaching,’ but not in civil ‘mine clearing.’
So, what to do? Well I used to make a living answering that question. For open areas a military flail will work. (If you can afford it.)
Then you train a bunch of local kids to search for the mines one by one with a 30cm plastic stick. When they find one they mark it for removal (‘mine lifting’) or destruction in place. To help them with this you can use whatever technology you can afford. Take your pick, ground-penetrating radars, metal detectors, mini-cyclotrons (I am not kidding) or Giant Rats from Sumatra.
Most people can only afford a plastic stick.
Then when the local lads get done with an area, you give them a football and play a standard hour and a half on the area to prove it is clean. It is the best way to show the locals the area is clear.
Then you go to the next area and keep doing it for the next few years. No fun.
We did have a program where we paid local Serbs to find and turn in mines laid by the Croats (or was it the other way 'round?). But that did not work. We wound up just buying the mines they still had in storage.
Sorry for the long-winded reply.
No, but the bomb group of which I was later a member (344th) was the first group in line to bomb the invasion beaches (Utah). Our squadron’s commander, Lt. Col. Jens Norgaard, was the first USAF guy on the scene, but only by a few feet.
So it was a British invention. They were just full of ideas. Churchill’s Mulberry harbors, having a Montgomery look-alike send on a tour of the Med(?) just before the invasion, radar, skipping bombs to take out dams and so on. I think creating a phantom invasion army commanded by George Patton was also a British idea I.
No such thing as a long-winded reply from an expert in the (mine)field.
I’m just wondering about two things on this subject.
Will it be harder to get the rats since the tsunami that hit Sumatra, and are there variations of mines that jump up, for lack of a better term, and then explode? Seems to me those types would do significant damage to a manned bulldozer-ish mine exploder.
Well, a ‘Bouncing Betty’ mine is an anti-personnel device. The mine launches a grenade that explodes in midair in order to turn people into long division problems. Any armored vehicles (like the M-9 ACE armored earth mover or the Israeli D-7/D-9 types) would laugh off such a blast.
Almost any trainable animal can be used to find mines. Dogs are good, but expensive. Rats are (I presume) cheaper and easier to carry around.
(It is almost bedtime here. More tomorrow if you have more questions.)
How do you avoid setting off the damn things while you’re poking them with sticks? Don’t some of them have contact switches in addition to pressure switches?
Are there any serious real-world uses of robots (either self-controlled or remote controlled) to sniff out mines? Ideally, we could hook up a chemical sniffer (hopefully cheaper than a gas chromatograph) and a radar or sonar unit to a simple, heavy tracked chassis and have it flag and/or detonate the mines it finds. (As for detonating it, maybe it could plant a smaller explosive with a remote detonation fuse and get back to a safe distance before exploding the charge and, hopefully, the mine along with it.)
Admittedly, only an army or extremely well-heeled private group would be able to afford any such device. But it would be worthwhile for any minefield the US or EU is tasked with clearing.
Huerta88 was making a humorous (to me at least) reference to a bit of Sherlock Holmes lore. In the stories, Watson often times refers to other tales that he hasn’t written up yet. One unwritten adventure involved the Giant Rat of Sumatra*. Unfortunately they haven’t been found since and there are some who question if they ever existed. Of course, they are the same deluded souls who think Holmes never existed.
The rats used in this context are African. And I need to say that a six pound rat is pretty :eek:.
The father of a good friend of mine works at Sandia National Labs. They are researching using bees to find mines.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1986769.stm
http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/land_mine_sniffers.htm – hea, my friends dad is quoted in this one…cool
Did you do the autobahn article where the photographer ended up eating his camera?