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Radio War Nerd EP #388 — Landmines (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-21 01:43:08
Imported:
2023-07
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Content

Recorded: July 18, 2023

The long awaited summer Ukrainian counteroffensive — the counteroffensive that Anne Applebaum says the future of democracy hinges on — unfortunately hinged on one flawed assumption: Russia doesn't know how to plant landmines. Turns out, Russia does know how to plant landmines. In fact they're very good at it. And that's a big problem. Because as we discuss, there is no effective weapon against landmines. 

Book cited: Landmines In War & Peace: From Their Origins To Present Day, by Mike Croll 

Total time: 1:24:07

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Sound production by Telescope Audio Studios

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

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*Buy John Dolan's comic memoir "Pleasant Hell" now available in both audio and ebookformat.

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Comments

PostmasterFenian

They should use a goat sacrifice to moloch to clear the mine fields

Jonathan Sheps

Moloch only accepts child sacrifices. Goat sacrifices are to Azazel. I know this site isn't too concerned with hardware nerdery, but these details matter.

Ossi Tapio

Here is a million dollar idea for some: a drone that is essentially just a pair of human legs. Mass produce them and them set them marching over a potential minefield. The challenge would be how to make them "intelligent" enough to navigate uneven/complex terrain, and how to make them cheap. Edit: see Boston Dynamics for potential examples

inactioninaction_

"a possibility for the first time ever that a far right party could take power in Germany" buddy. c'mon now

Doug Cartel

Two things Ukrainians are alleged to have said about NATO's efforts for them: -The training they received was only COIN operations, nothing relevant to trench fighting -The tanks they received were designed for desert warfare and not the east european steppe As far as the first one goes I think they probably mainly meant urban warfare instead of COIN, because that can be anything from house-to-house fighting to just pseudo-police officer shenanigans. But yeah, early on in the war we heard NATO simps going "these idiot Russians are digging trenches, didnt anyone tell these losers World War 1 was a century ago?" Whoops. Tuns out they're still useful. Reminds me of americans slapping their foreheads and wondering about $15 million choppers getting destroyed by $10,000 firecracker launchers or whatever they used to talk about in 2003. The 2nd one is funny to me because they supposedly said "designed" and as far as I know, no tank was ever designed from the ground up for desert warfare. If anything, you design them for as many scenarios as possible and then slap some modifications on top for scenarios you couldn't design for. So maybe they're getting Leopards with sand screens on the vents or whatever, but it's not like the thing is incapable of seeing targets when there's any vegetation at all. These are just complaints I heard second hand so who knows, it's not very important anyways but I felt like rambling about it.

Doug Cartel

Also, did you see that West Point analysis talking about the Recon Strike Complex? Might be useful to look at the war through that lens, it was interesting. But yeah, America's attempt at a quick mine-clearing op was to take an Abrams and stick a giant plough to the front. The idea was to dig so deep into the earth that you would get under the mines, then bulldoze the soil off to the left and right of the tank. It would pave a path for friendly vehicles to follow (assuming there aren't deeper mines) but of course once the AFU ploughs were destroyed by the Russians, the tanks were now sitting in linear kill boxes which had a gaggle of mines surrounding the paved path.

PostmasterFenian

i mean much cheaper lower tech to just make some RC tractor thing. problem is there usually are a lot of mines in fields.

PostmasterFenian

damn well i'll defer the demonology to you son. This whole thing feels like one big blood sacrifice ritual to NAFO/Western Defense Contractors.

Hugo

He clearly meant post war. But yea I thought it was kind of funny

David Andrews

This was a very educational and timely episode. Well-done guys.

Karl Childers

this is a great idea if you're an arms contractor but it ain't gonna beat the trained rat strategy in bang-for-buck

PostmasterFenian

They need a Cambodian storm vermin army. Don't think you can get around minefields with out line charges and sappers though

Candido Gonzalez

Damn good episode fellas. I just spent the last couple hours down a rat mine finder rabbit hole

Jon

It was an interesting comment from the book author on the "unsexiness" of landmines. I got to thinking about cinematic portrayals of war and how little we see of mines, and remembered a pretty decent British film called Kajaki which takes place entirely in a minefield - it focuses on an incident in Afghanistan when British paratroopers strayed into an old Soviet minefield, set off 2 mines and when a Chinook arrived to evacuate the casualties the downdraft set off yet another mine.

Christopher Small

I'm going to play devil's advocate on the "combined arms" thing. It really is an issue for Ukraine that they can only really attack at the brigade level down, as it was for Russia when they went in. Minefields are an issue, but they're also inert and basically something you can deal with if you have enough space to do so. But creating that space requires formations with the depth resources to enact counter measures or the mutual support to fight off counter attacks. That the Ukrainian army isn't organized for that is a big part of the reason they keep getting bogged down, and the fact that the Russian army has reoriented itself along Divisional lines has been a big help in organizing counterattacks to push them back to square one. What's pigheaded on the NATO side is trying to put this all on the Ukrainians. Western armies are just as much focused on small scale operations, and we've seen pretty clearly that western trainers are basically clueless on what to do because they haven't had to fight this kind of war in decades either. And of course the fact that Ukraine's arsenal is kind of an unbalanced hodgepodge doesn't help either

etienne

good ep but I think there was one huge blind spot, is that mines are really bad PR. I think the first I heard about them was when i was in high school during the aughts and a student organization was militating for a ban on landmines and railing that the US and Russia were the only two significant non-signatories of a landmine ban treaty. over the years I came to understand that cluster bombs served as de facto landmines (i spent so many hours in my youth reading books with illustrations of Panavia Tornados putting eastern airstrips out of service with low altitude cluster munition runs and only later realized that this was a completely cooked selling point) and then it always seemed like mines was one of those things that only crazy people really did anymore, especially on the korean border. I'd have wanted to hear more about the US use of landmines in either Gulf Wars, you touched that they used them in Kuwait which sounds pretty weird to me, that was seems like it was such a cakewalk, such a good live training exercise, why even bother with mining? Does that imply that landmining was part of the initial planning phase for even a mid scale defensive war that everyone already thought would be a slap on the wrist show of force? that seems just kind of gratuioutous also on the russian side that sounds like russia is shifting out of a position to secure territory for itself more into a posture of interdicting it off from anyone, either them or ukraine. Anyone? that or they really trust their maps for demining themselves down the road

JoR

If he's able to be contacted you may want to consider getting Mike Croll as a guest. The thesis you read sounded spot on, and it sounds like he'd be able to fill an episode overview of the history and also the present day usage. He'd probably love to be interviewed, I doubt he gets asked often since it's on such a "dull" topic (as he put it)

a clash of purple

I'll take the good PR, and you can use the landmines. See which is more useful in a fight.

etienne

that's not what i meant, i wanted to say it was underdiscussed in the ep, but true that

Gengeros

Just to let you know the Shiba Inu meme dog was established well before Elon and NAFO.

Gengeros

I thought every southern state contributed division sizes of troops, but I think a few South Carolinians were part of the union army.

JoR

These are good points, but the PR battle is basically over in this war. I can't imagine Russians view in most of Europe/the west will change much. Same with Russias friends (or at least business partners), the mines aren't gonna sway their opinion either way

Steve Mathews

This cluster munitions debate is suffering from a lack of technical knowledge. The cluster munition that Ukraine has gotten is DPICM, which is basically normal US artillery ammo. FASCAM is Field Artillery Scatterable Mines, which is a whole different type of ammo, which I don't know that the US has given Ukraine.

Steve Mathews

Neither is the classic, air-delivered "cluster bomb" that has historically caused such agita. Both DPICM and FASCAM are pretty clean compared to the earlier air-delivered munitions.

Michael L

“Damn the Torpedoes” not only a great album but said by Daniel Farragut at Mobile Bay FYI, somebody has probably already said this but I haven’t yet read the comments

PostmasterFenian

For all the news about western apcs, ifvs, and tanks im not really sure we've given them a whole lot last I checked they had been promised/given a little over a 100 leopard 2s, challenger 2s and abrahms (and the 30 abrahms have not gotten there yet so that brings the relatively modern western tank total to what 115), around 186 Bradley's maybe 157 strykers, 50 cv90s (still not delivered), and around 60 marders. The bulk of western vehicles seems to be mraps at around 800 and m113s at slightly over 500 (which were awful in the nam era and worse in a lot of ways than bmps), and now 200 leopard 1as ( which are significantly worse than t-64s let alone the significantly upgraded ones the ukranians are fielding). I'd imagine that the modernized t72 variants they got from former Warsaw pact countries might have played a bigger role given they received I think over 300 of those. Given the current attritional nature of the war though I think artillery (which we've given them a shit ton of) is more important.

William

Anne applebaum deserves to be launched into the sun

SB

A good overview of the mine factor, even if, ironically, it is presented as almost a monocausal explanation of the failure of the counteroffensive. I’m surprised you didn’t cover demining via detonation. Both Russia and Ukraine have used UR-77s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UR-77_Meteorit) with some limited success. Mark’s “US military is still the best in the world” raised a question in my head - what’s the empirical evidence for such a statement? Janes? Iraq? Afghanistan? It’s arguable that the US Army even if pulled together from the hundreds of bases worldwide wouldn’t survive a few weeks against the Ukrainian military under the real war conditions of AD, EW, massive artillery fire, minefields, and casualties.

SB

True. Western MBTs were overhyped to begin with. They appear to be much less fit for this battle environment than T-72s and T-64S. And their numbers are inconsequential.

William

They should use the Boston dynamics dogs to clear land mines

a clash of purple

Well, it's a meaningless statement, right? Wars are way too complicated and contextual to say "this or that army is 'the best.'" And the most important things are, like, public sentiment, morale, all the intangibles. Like, I agree that the U.S. Army probably wouldn't fare much better than the Russians if they were the ones invading Ukraine, but if the Ukrainian military somehow tried to invade the United States, even assuming they could get to North America and have supplies to fight there, what could they do? A lot of countries have all the necessary resources to field an unstoppable military force, in terms of manpower, infrastructure, technology, materiel, etc.. The question is always whether their population is willing to make the necessary sacrifices, and the reality is that any group of people *can* be pushed to the point where they'll do whatever it takes, given the right circumstances and motivation.

a clash of purple

What's the point of the tank on a modern battlefield? Not armored vehicles in general, but the main battle tank specifically. If you need to shoot something with a big gun, you've got recoilless rifles, hand-held missile launchers, drones, air support, artillery... Do you really need to bring the big gun within line of sight of your target these days?

Hans Anders

Great episode. Love the smug BBC voice imitation

Jay Sea

Classic war nerd vibes on this one

JoR

The best episodes are just the two of them, we don't get enough non-guest episodes anymore

Karl Childers

hard to say what makes an army the best these days, but if we're talking navies then the US comes out ahead by an order of magnitude, basically total dominance of every ocean for the past 60 years

radiowarnerd

Thank you very much. I half believed I'd dreamed that melody.

Stefan

Was thinking about representations of landmines in film and recalled that in ”The English Patient” there is a Sikh character who defuses them and he has some sort of affair with a female lead. More than this I don’t remember.

David Gyllenhaal

It's worth bringing up probably the greatest Russian success story with mines of the last century—the Battle of Kursk. An ex-DOD quantitative obsessive tried to do some back of the envelope with the records we could access as of 2015. (Pretty strange guy affiliated with a pretty strange operations research outfit called the Dupuy Institute, but when it it comes to the Battle of Kursk he seems to come by his obsessions honestly): http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/2018/10/31/mines-at-kursk-i/ His figures come out to about 300,000 each of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in the broader salient, 600,000 in total. In parts of it, that was something like 1,600 each of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines per kilometer of front. And it seemed to work. Not great on German infantry, but what really felt the bite was the tanks. There were days when almost 80% of the reported tank losses were to mines. So this has always been a problem for the blitzkrieg combined arms that gets everyone's blood pumping; if you know where to expect it, and the frontage is narrow enough, and you have a lot of mines stockpiled, well... The WW2 Heer still has a pretty good rep for their proficiency in combined arms warfare, but that didn't seem to solve their mine problem. I'd also be willing to bet that the quantities of mines available to the Russians now are large orders of magnitude beyond what was available at the time of Kursk.

chris

Just a quible…did you guys really say “Russians are stupid but they win in the end because they are brutal”? Come on, that’s not analysis and borders on racist

Cole Robillard

This analysis is stupid. Not that I’m a nato fan but wtf are you guys talking about. You can’t compare the Ukraine Air Force to that of nato’s. This is not representative of what that fight would look like. Thinking of stopping my patronage because of this level of analysis

Alex

Good stuff. To the point about Russia amassing 100k troops to retake Kupiansk: a guy who does pretty good analysis of the war is Brian Berletic at The New Atlas. He's been debunking the NATO "Russia is demoralized and depleted, running out of troops, running out of ammo" narrative basically since the beginning of the war. Carl Zha goes on his show sometimes too.

PostmasterFenian

while its probably true that nato has a more extensive airforce than say ukraines idk if they could get air superiority over a dense s300/400/500 network the israeli's have lots of problems over syria. Also love the karens in the war nerd comment section. I think brendan is the manager if you want to speak to him.