When is a landmine not a landmine? This is the question facing officials at the Pentagon who are due to decide whether to start producing a new generation of what the army calls 鈥渋ntelligent munitions鈥� at the start of December.
While traditional landmines maim and kill indiscriminately, these weapons have to be monitored and activated remotely by a soldier watching events on a laptop. 鈥淚f there鈥檚 a school bus, the bus drives on, but if it鈥檚 an armoured personnel carrier it will be destroyed,鈥� a US military spokesman says.
The mines will be designed to self-destruct without injuring anyone after a set period of time, which officials say will remove the threat to civilians after a war has ended.
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The first system, called Matrix, was sent to Iraq earlier this year and relies on an operator using radio signals to detonate traditional claymore mines.
A more advanced system called Spider, which US officials have yet to approve, consists of a control unit capable of monitoring up to 84 unattended munitions that are linked by a web of tripwires. When a tripwire is activated, an operator must decide whether to blow up the mine or to use non-lethal options.
Spider will also use the global positioning system to keep tabs on the location of each mine.
But critics argue that soldiers looking at a laptop screen will find it hard to differentiate between an enemy soldier and a civilian. And the system could be fitted with a 鈥渂attle-override鈥� switch, so that someone stepping into the area would automatically detonate it like traditional landmines.
鈥淭hey are not the kind of mines that have created the global problem, but they do still have a victim-activated mode,鈥� says Steve Goose, director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. The issue also has political implications. It could create future problems for US allies, he says, because while the US is not signed up to the Mine Ban Treaty, the majority of western countries, including the UK, are.
