Abstract
Despite twenty-first-century technological advances by Western militaries for demining and the removal of improvised explosive devices, humanitarian demining relies mostly on mid-twentieth-century technology. While international legal efforts to curb the global use of landmines have been quite successful, constraints on humanitarian demining technology mean that unfortunate and preventable deaths of both civilians and deminers continue to occur. Developing devices and technologies to help human deminers successfully and safely carry out their work is a major challenge. Each phase of the physical demining process (i.e., vegetation clearance, mine detection, and removal) can benefit from the development of demining technologies. However, even with the prospect of “smart” demining technology, the human aspect of supervision remains a crucial challenge. Although current research and development hold promise for the future of humanitarian demining, the barriers to progress in the field are more than technical. The prioritization of military operations, a lack of coordination between governments and humanitarian actors, a tendency towards secrecy, and an underlying lack of funding are just some of the roadblocks to eliminating the yearly death toll associated with humanitarian demining, in addition to other impacts on post-conflict societies. This paper calls for new ideas, renewed innovation, and new sources of governmental and non-governmental support for this often-neglected aspect of international security.
Highlights
Landmines remain deadly decades after wars end
The Need for Innovation Given that the advanced systems and technologies described above may run into problems in some difficult field conditions, the preliminary or prototype devices could be used for the easier demining projects at first
Future models could be deployed to areas containing more complex mixtures of landmines, shrapnel, anti-tank mines, unexploded ordnance (UXO), abandoned explosive ordinance, and improvised explosive device (IED)
Summary
Landmines remain deadly decades after wars end. They continue to impact some 60 countries around the world. The vehicle has the added advantage of knocking the fuses off fragmentation mines (or initiating them), thereby reducing the hazard for the clearance teams that follow They are designed for humanitarian demining applications rather than military applications, i.e., they are not designed to withstand anti-tank mines (Smith 2017c). Issues remain around radar head and power requirements adding weight, cost, and technological complexity to the hand-held device They can prove cost-effective by reducing false alarms, increasing clearing speed, and reducing the clearance cost per square metre. Some handheld dual-sensor detectors are already on the market.5 They have been demonstrated in field tests and praised for their capabilities and increases in productivity by organizations such as The HALO Trust (Boshoff and Cresci 2015; The HALO Trust 2011), while other advances continue apace with related technology (Sato 2019). For multi-sensor systems, the various outputs can be fused
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call