"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Amara Graps wrote:
>
> > Remove the landmines first, please.
>
> A highly extropic suggestion! And then lobby to eliminate them
> as a tool of war. They are right next to biological and chemical
> weapons as really inhumane tools.
As a veteran, I'd have to disagree that landmines are intrinsically
'inhumane'. They certainly can be used in inhumane ways, no doubt, but
they are also highly useful tools in many circumstances.
I highly doubt that the people of South Korea, for example, think the
millions of landmines in the DMZ are 'inhumane'. Imagine if they were
not there, the whole penninsula would have long been overrun by the
North and their Chinese allies, and the whole penninsula would be
undeveloped and suffering from the famine that is currently confined to
the North. Far more would suffer and die from that famine in the South,
and today only the occasional NKA infiltrator is killed in the DMZ.
Similarly, US forces have historically entered conflict outnumbered by
their opponents. Their only advantage is the use of technology. As a
tactic of combat, the use of landmines to ambush and pin down a larger
opposing force in order to target it with artillery from miles away is a
seminal one that US forces perfected in Vietnam. Use of landmines to
protect a forward operating base (i.e. the famed "A-team" bases) against
being overrun by superior opposing numbers is also a highly important
defense tool.
The problem, of course, is that most landmines do not distinguish
between combatant and non-combatant, and most are simply abandoned by
those that install them. Furthermore, guerrilla insurgents will
typically dig up mines and move them to locations where they are
guaranteed to be triggered by non-combatants, and some operations
(committed by both the East and the West) will scatter such mines
haphazardly over an area (as the Soviets did in Afghanistan, the Cubans
did in Angola, and the US did in Haiphong and Managua Harbors).
Landmines should not be disbursed from aircraft, for starters. They
should be built to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant via
metal detection, etc., and should be programmed to either go off or
deactivate after a given time period, or upon being triggered by an
encoded radio signal. Using measures like this would go a long way to
ensuring that mines are used in strictly military fashion.
As for the damage of a landmine on a combatant, as opposed to other
forms of battle field attack, I'd much rather lose a foot to a landmine
than getting a bullet through the spine. Which do you think is more
humane?
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