Mine Warfare and Globalization: Low-Tech Warfare in a High-Tech World

Thomas R. Bernitt and Sam J. Tangredi

In a conventional military sense, globalization has been with us for many decades. The era of an abundant and seemingly unlimited supply of military weapons—fanned by the subsidies of the Cold War—has made it possible for just about every military and paramilitary force to have access to everything short of nuclear ballistic weapons (and that gap may soon be closing as well). The irony is that while many would argue that the economic effects of globalization have bifurcated the world more precisely into haves and have-nots, just the opposite is true in regard to the globalization of conventional weapons. From the grenade launcher to the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, the process of globalization has, in some ways, facilitated a democratization of conventional forces. Now every military has some degree of access to technology that can support a slice of the modern technological forms of warfare. But despite such a spectrum of death available to the highest bidder, the most democratic of these weapons is also the least technologically advanced: the mine.

Whether on land or at sea, the mine now constitutes the true everyman weapon whose very universality serves as a reminder of the progress of modern life. If globalization means the ability for consumers and producers to create a world where everyone has access to all the world’s products (if not necessarily the ability to purchase them), then the very proliferation of mines to arsenals throughout the world—including those of nonstate actors—means that we are all more or less equal. At least, we are all more or less vulnerable on a scale not witnessed before.

This means that most average citizens in the Third World are threatened to some degree (some much more than others, such as in Afghanistan or Cambodia or parts of Africa) every day by landmines. It also means that every navy, along with commercial shipping, is threatened to some degree by the sea mine, even when operating in neutral waters or offshore the most technologically unadvanced of nations. The annual report issued by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, founded by Nobel laureate Jody Williams, lists 76 countries where mine clearance is occurring, excluding the countries that might have them in their territories but are unable to exorcise them.¹

Although landmines can be (relatively) technologically advanced either with plastic casings that make locating and thus neutralizing them almost impossible or with computer chip sensors that can discriminate between the most similar of targets (or both), the sad truth is that landmines do not have to be that sophisticated to be effective. Rather, the sheer number of mines, the impenetrability of the medium (soil), and the lack of technologically advanced methods for clearance make them just as effective when employing World War I technology as when they contain 21st-century technologies. In fact, the United States still clears landmines basically the same way that the Armed Forces did during World War II: through either brute force or one at a time by single soldiers armed with magnetometers. The new technologies of ground-penetrating radar, chemical analysis, and sonar mapping all have been confounded by the imperviousness of the soil to give up what it considers its own secrets willingly. Thus, the mine-clearer, whether Afghani, Egyptian, Cambodian, or American, usually moves inch by inch in a painstaking advance of modern blind man’s bluff.

Yet to this point, we have been addressing the effects that the availability of landmines has on the civilian populations of the world. Although problematic in a very serious way to these people—if only because of the humanitarian element of the argument—landmines nevertheless do not necessarily pose insurmountable problems to most modern armies of the world because of the air mobility that these armies possess, especially the armies of the United States and Western Europe. Landmines instead tend to restrict the movements of ground-based forces that one tends to find almost exclusively in the Third World. Afghanistan provides the perfect current example of the efficacy of the landmine when opposing unsophisticated armies, hence the universal appeal of landmines as defensive weapons to these kinds of land forces.

But it is the sea mine that still presents the greatest impediment to modern military forces. To understand this modern threat, a cursory overview of the development of the sea mine as a viable weapon is necessary.

Anatomy of a Weapon

Although the modern sea mine bears little resemblance to its 19th-century antecedent in terms of technical sophistication, the original definition given to what then were called torpedoes still holds true: an unattended underwater explosive. Antiship devices of one sort or another have been used since Grecian times with a fairly consistent failure rate. The primary problem that plagued the early proponents of mine warfare was the design of a firing system that would fire at the most opportune moment—preferably when an enemy ship was within striking distance and not when the mine was being planted.

It was not until the 19th century that the first practical firing mechanism for an underwater explosive device was developed.² Essentially, the device consisted of a glass tube that contained sulfuric acid in a mixture of sugar and potassium chlorate powder. It, in turn, was protected in a sheath of lead. When something large, such as a ship, ran into the explosive container, the glass tube broke and the chemicals reacted exothermically with one another, causing the explosive to detonate. In addition, the mines were anchored in a stationary location in order to wait passively for targets to move toward them. This concept of passive operational deployment was to remain the norm until the development of active target-seeking mines in the 1960s. However, many of the mines still stockpiled by Third World nations remain based on this principle.

Many of the early mines were extremely unreliable because of their primitive firing systems and unpredictable explosives (gun cotton and black powder). Furthermore, when deployed in saltwater, they corroded easily and quickly became totally ineffective. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that such engineering problems would be sufficiently solved so that mines could be used extensively and contribute strategically to the outcome of a war.

The Hague Conference was convened in 1907 as the first attempt to negotiate viable restrictions upon the employment of mine warfare by belligerent nations. Essentially, four basic points were agreed upon: it was forbidden to lay drifting mines unless “they are so constructed as to become harmless one hour at most after those who have laid them have lost control over them”; it was forbidden to lay “automatic contact mines which do not become harmless as soon as they have broken loose from their moorings”; it was forbidden to lay automatic contact mines off the coasts and ports of the enemy with the sole purpose of intercepting commercial navigation; and every possible precaution must be used to ensure safe navigation to nonbelligerents when moored minefields are employed. That these agreements were largely unenforceable and (from a military standpoint) essentially impractical if mining was to offer any tactical or strategic advantage is borne out by the actions of the belligerents during World War I when they were largely ignored. The Hague agreements were scheduled for renewal in 1914, but the war prevented it, and consequently the stipulations of the original 1907 Hague Convention were never updated or amended. It remains, for all practical purposes, the basic international agreement on mine warfare in force today.

World War I witnessed the first extensive use of sea mines as a major weapon in a total war as the allies and central powers used mines in tactical situations up through 1918. The most significant employment of mines was the result of the inability of the United States and Britain to counter the German U-boat threat with conventional surface actions. Consequently, the two allies embarked on what has come to be termed the North Sea Barrage in which over 72,000 mines were laid between the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland to the northern coast of Norway. According to several sources, the effects of the barrage ranged from negligible to questionable, due to the extent of the area coverage (over 250 nautical miles), the depth of the water, and the unreliability of the mines.³ However, despite its minimal success, it was becoming increasingly apparent to military planners throughout the world that “the mine would make the difference if [it was] properly designed, properly reliable, and properly supplemented by other forces.”⁴

World War II ushered in the modern age of mines through the development of the bottom influence mine. The significance was twofold. First, the underwater mine no longer required a heavy anchor in order to be moored within the path of a ship. Instead, the new influence mines could detect ship presence as they lay on the sea bottom, detonating at the precise opportune moment of the ship’s passage. With this development, the mine could now be delivered by airplane against an enemy’s protected harbors, giving the mine an offensive potential for the first time. Secondly, the coverage of a minefield was dramatically increased since a ship no longer was required to run into an influence mine. In other words, fewer mines could threaten a much larger area.

This combination was not lost on U.S. Navy planners who formulated a massive offensive mining campaign, code-named Operation Starvation, against the Japanese homeland from March 27, 1945, until the first of August of the same year. Over 12,000 mines were laid, primarily by airplane but supplemented by submarine. By the war’s end, the operation was successful in cutting the total imports of the Japanese by 97 percent. It has been debated whether the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been necessary if Operation Starvation had begun 6 months earlier.⁵

Just as World War II demonstrated the offensive potential of mine warfare, the Korean War reaffirmed the mine’s defensive possibilities, especially when used by a qualitatively inferior force to stop a technically superior one. Specifically, North Korea effectively prevented the U.S. Army from landing at Wonson Harbor in October 1950 primarily through the use of Russian MKB mines, one of the world’s most unsophisticated moored mines.⁶ Approximately 3,000 of these mines were laid by sampan and junk in combination with a few bottom influence mines. Despite the relative crudeness of the operation, the North Koreans were able to sink four U.S. minesweepers, damage several destroyers, and—more importantly from a strategic aspect—delay the landing of U.S. troops by a full week at a critical juncture of the war.⁷

The modern underwater mine has evolved from the crude and (by today’s standards) largely ineffective influence mine employed near the end of World War II to a highly sophisticated, computerized weapon that in some cases can seek and destroy targets autonomously. The electronic arming and fuzing devices that have been incorporated into today’s mines allow them to be extremely sensitive in the target acquisition phase yet impervious to incidental background influences. They are also highly selective and accurate in target discrimination capabilities and rugged enough to withstand tremendous depth pressures for extended periods of time. In addition, simultaneous improvements in explosive blast/weight ratios, as well as the recent advances in the miniaturization of electronic circuitries, have made mines smaller and hence easier to deploy. As a result, a few mines can be used with strategic effect when employed in low-intensity conflicts in which the objectives are primarily disruption of seaborne supply channels in and out of principal ports. Additionally, the ease of concealment and deployment has facilitated their attractiveness as a preemptive weapon prior to the beginning of conventional hostilities.

The actual assessment of mine effectiveness is a fairly arcane process that attempts to quantify a statistical probability of kill against certain types of shipping based on such factors as minefield density, damage criteria, and parameters of ship traffic. Strictly counting the number of ships sunk by mines has never been considered an accurate method of determining a particular minefield’s utility. For example, during World War II, the United States aerially planted mines in the mouth of Palau atoll in the Pacific. Due to their disinclination to move through the minefield, the Japanese elected to keep their fleet of 32 ships in the harbor where they became sitting ducks for American torpedo planes and bombers, which were able to sink every ship the very next day.⁸ Consequently, minefield planners frequently argue what a minefield could have accomplished rather than what the actual results were. It is necessary to keep in mind, therefore, the ability of a minefield to deny access to or out of a particular geographic area (a capability admittedly not easily measured but rather inferred) as opposed to a numerical accounting of mine to ships sunk ratio.

Modern Use of Sea Mines

Mines today can be roughly classified into four major categories: moored contact mines (World War I technology); bottom influence mines (with significant improvements on what was introduced during World War II); moored influence mines (post-World War II antisubmarine weapons); and moored influence target-seeking mines. This last category is considered to be the most significant development in mine technology since the advent of influence mines at the beginning of World War II.

Moored contact mines still in service today have not radically altered in design since World War I. They consist basically of two types: the chemical-horn design previously described and the galvanic antenna mine, a device suspending a copper wire several feet above a chemical-horn mine by means of a float. The contact of a ship’s steel hull with the copper wire in saltwater produces an electrical current that subsequently fires the mine. Using this procedure, the target range of the contact mine was increased threefold. Most moored mines are difficult to deploy because of size (a large air cavity must be contained in the mine body) and because of their weight (a heavy anchor and steel cable are necessary for mooring). Consequently, only surface ships and a few specially configured submarines operating on the surface are suitable for planting these mines. A minefield containing only moored contact mines, for all intents and purposes, has to be planted overtly in one’s own waters as a defensive barrier against enemy combatants rather than in enemy-controlled harbors and chokepoints.⁹

The bottom influence mine, by eliminating the requirement for an air cavity in the mine as well as an anchor, significantly reduces mine size and weight. As a result, influence mines are now configured for aircraft and submarine deployment into hostile environments. The early influence mines were strictly magnetically actuated, firing only when the magnetic field of a ship was detected by a sensor inside the mine. These mines were unreliable and frequently fired either before or after the ship was overhead, thus causing minimal or no damage to the intended target. Today, however, bottom influence mines are not only much more reliable but also use two other kinds of influence signals to fire: an acoustic signal and pressure signal. Mines can now be set to detect a variety of ship signals before firing, which increases both the mine’s reliability and discrimination capabilities. In the more sophisticated bottom influence mines, microcircuit computer technology has been incorporated into sensing and firing systems with the result that they can be set to fire against a much more specific range of targets. In fact, it is now theoretically possible to adjust the sensitivity setting of a programmable mine to the point where the mine will fire only on certain classes of ships.¹⁰ However, such exclusive targeting is usually not considered to be an effective use of mine capabilities since this fine-tuning overly restricts the range of available targets that the minefield can attack.

Mine technology has also developed various counter-countermeasure devices that have made bottom influence mines more resistant to sweeping and other countermeasure techniques. These include delay-arming devices that allow the minefield to remain dormant until such time as it is required to become active; ship counters that allow the mines to fire only after a prescribed number of ships has transited the area; probability actuator circuits that randomly turn mine circuitry on and off; and nonferrous mine casings and anechoic mine coatings that reduce the sonar reflection of the mine and, consequently, increase the difficulty of minehunting.

During and immediately following World War II, the nominal target range of bottom influence mines was sufficient to be effective against surface ships as well as submarines operating in shallow water. The physics of underwater explosions basically restricts the effectiveness of bottom mines against surface targets to a maximum depth of 200 feet because the air bubble that the explosive creates—the primary destructive element of the mine against ships—dissipates to such a degree after 200 feet that it no longer contains sufficient force to effect consistent damage beyond that range. This does not usually pose insurmountable problems when the intended target areas include harbors, channels, and amphibious landing beaches—normally areas close enough to shore that the depths would not be greater than 200 feet.

Improvements in the design of modern submarines, however, significantly altered the necessary depth capabilities of the mine. Initially, the moored influence mine was designed specifically to counter the deep-water submarine threat. These mines, however, proved to be ineffective at depths near the continental shelf (600 feet) and practically useless when used in deeper waters—the prime operating area of the modern submarine—because of the relatively small target width provided by their stationary explosive charge.¹¹ Nevertheless, they are still in the inventory of the U.S. Navy, despite efforts since 1960 to develop a replacement. The Russian Navy also has retained a shallow water moored influence mine in their inventory whose principal utility seems to be for export rather than for Russian operational use.

Consequently, the problem was to develop a mine that, while planted in the operating depths of the submarine, would be effective against an area large enough to require relatively few mines. Thus the requirement for the prohibitive number of mines that would have to be planted to pose a serious threat to the submarine in forward operating areas would be eliminated. Ironically, the answer was arrived at more or less simultaneously by both Soviet and American mine engineers in the late 1960s: marry the concept of the mine and the torpedo into an independently deployable package that, once the mine has detected an appropriate target, would automatically launch and destroy it. The result was the moored influence, target-seeking mine.

These mines (presently in both U.S. and Russian inventories) have basically taken the advanced arming and firing technology of the most sophisticated influence mines and incorporated it into available torpedo and rocket hardware so that, in essence, the new mines are unmanned torpedo platforms that deploy in the deep operating depths of the modern submarine. When the mine senses an enemy submarine within a target detection range of several hundred yards, it will fire its single torpedo or rocket toward the target.

Mines have been used extensively since the Korean War by a growing number of nations. Known mining incidents have occurred in:

Today, there is obviously no longer a monopoly by the wealthy industrialized nations on mine warfare since mines have become increasingly available to the Third World. The technology of today’s mines makes them ideally suited to low-intensity conflicts when the strategic objective becomes a cut-off of sea transported supplies rather than naval confrontation. Until the Persian Gulf War, however, deploying mines remained only within the purview of the major nations. That all changed in 1990.

A simple World War I design (patterned after the Imperial Russian MKB moored mine), the LUGM 140, an indigenous mine manufactured by Iraq, was deployed in late 1990 as a floating mine throughout the Arabian Gulf. Although specifically in violation of the 1907 Hague Treaty, which prohibited such “floaters,” the mines complicated the maneuver capabilities of the naval armada positioned in the Gulf prior to and during the outbreak of hostilities. Additionally, and probably more importantly, the mines helped to stall the world’s greatest Navy in its tracks in February 1991 off the shore of Kuwait because of the inability of the U.S. Navy, and anyone else for that matter, to sweep the sea lanes effectively prior to an amphibious invasion. The LUGM presence, as well as the presence of the more sophisticated Swedish manufactured Mantas (a magnetically activated mine that caused the damage to USS Tripoli and USS Princeton during the Gulf War), was a prime consideration of war planners designing options for landing marines ashore near Kuwait City. During that war, with no credible countermine capability, the U.S. Navy actually experimented, midwar, with individual swimmers armed with snorkels and facemasks merely to try to create an ad hoc minimalist capability that might ascertain the presence or nonpresence of mines in the assault lanes. Most of this effort was expended for a mine essentially based on a pre-World War I design.

For purposes of our argument on the globalization and subsequent proliferation of the mining capability, not only are the sea mines a threat from a traditional government organization, such as the Iraqi military, but, similar to their land mine brethren, they also can be employed effectively by paramilitary forces as well. Our own Central Intelligence Agency proved the point during the mid-1980s when it mined some ports off the coast of Nicaragua during the contra conflicts. Using a 55-gallon drum filled with explosives and fuzing devices, these homemade mines were intended to disrupt military supplies and commercial activities supplying the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega.

The capabilities of a modern armed force to countermine these sea mines in a timely manner has not significantly improved. Still without verified methodologies within the shallow water zone, the principle stumbling block to Gulf War access from the sea, the U.S. Navy and by extension the remainder of the world, is still vulnerable to the strategically laid sea mine. The question then could be whether globalization has been the culprit. One could easily say that economies of scale and simplicity of design came long before the weapons supermarket became a fact of life. Certainly, the global nature today of weapons availability made them all the easier to obtain but not necessarily easier to clear. Therein lies the Faustian bargain. Something that is cheap, easy to deploy, and thwarts the most powerful adversary through sheer numbers and simplicity becomes the hardest to counteract.

Problems of Countermeasures

As indicated earlier, there are technical countermeasures to mines, and the U.S. Navy continues to pursue both organic and mission-dedicated solutions. No problem is insolvable as long as one is willing to pay the cost to solve it. As chapter 17 notes, submarines may be the optimal platform to hunt mines at the outer edges of the littoral regions and possible in chokepoints and sea lines of communication. But the author of that chapter does not go so far as to advocate building specialized minehunting submarines; other missions appear to be a greater priority.

The U.S. Navy and many allied and friendly navies do have dedicated surface minehunters and minesweepers, but it is obvious to anyone who has studied American naval force structure that mine countermeasures still are not a priority to our fleet. Otherwise, countermine forces would not be as starved for resources as they have traditionally been. The programs that are funded, such as the Galveston-based countermine squadron, helicopter squadrons, and explosive ordnance disposal programs (such as marine mammals) are a miniscule part of the overall Navy budget, well below 5 percent—even with generous amounts of service overhead added in.

This situation is understandable. During the Cold War, minehunting and minesweeping were the primary responsibilities of the smaller North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) navies. The expected threat was a Soviet minelaying campaign directed against Western European ports in order to prevent military reinforcements from being transported across the Atlantic from the United States and Canada. It was natural enough to expect the nations to whom the ports belonged, such as the Dutch, Belgians, Germans, Norwegians, and Danes, to be responsible for neutralizing the mine threats to their own ports. More importantly, these nations could not afford to build their own large oceangoing warships in great numbers. Under the logic of scarce resources and comparative advantage, it made sense for many of the smaller NATO navies to put much or the majority of their resources into mine countermeasures, while the United States put most or almost all of its resources into globally deployable combatants. Since it is impossible to mine deep water effectively, the sea mine threat would not affect U.S. and Canadian forces until they were in the littoral regions where the smaller NATO navies could sweep channels and escort them.

However, with the end of the Cold War, this supposedly easy solution lost its rationale. If a war with Russia was so unlikely, protecting the European ports was no longer a focus of mine countermeasures. A part of the NATO capability atrophied; there were now more important priorities than naval spending. But even more critical, the local mine countermeasure capabilities could not be swiftly deployed to regions in which conflict was now expected. At a transit speed of 10 knots or less (less than half of that of a globally capable surface combatant or aircraft carrier), NATO mine countermeasures ships coming from Western European ports and their U.S. equivalents coming from across the Atlantic for Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm were not timely enough or in sufficient numbers to have much of an impact on the mine threat until the Gulf War was over. The United States has kept two mine countermeasures ships homeported (or, technically, permanently forward deployed) to the Arabian Gulf region, rotating their crews from the United States by air. But two ships, supplemented by the faster arriving helicopter squadrons, could hardly make a dent against a prepared (albeit poorly coordinated) Iraqi mine campaign. As noted in chapter 19, the mines were already in place before coalition navies arrived in numbers, and, more importantly, before they were allowed to fire at the Iraqi minelayers—hence, the damage to USS Tripoli and USS Princeton.

As indicated, an even more difficult threat than the mines lurking on the littoral edge (after all, oceangoing warships could avoid them by staying clear and using long-range weapons to attack Iraqi forces) were the mines planted in the near-shore littoral and surf zone against which there was little the coalition could do at minimal risk. Certainly countermine swimmers could have been sacrificed in large numbers (assuming large numbers could be quickly trained); countermine vessels could have been exposed to greater, almost-certain chance of destruction; even the old, sardonic suggestion of filling empty merchant vessels with ping-pong balls and driving them through the minefields to set off the mines could have been tried (although with little success against the more sophisticated bottom mines). But none of these would have been particularly effective, even if the losses were acceptable. In the American style of war, few potential opponents are worth a damn-the-torpedoes amphibious assault when long-range air strikes could provide gradual attrition.

All of this would seem a wakeup call for a global Navy focused on littoral operations. Indeed, there has been a renewed interest in countermine programs. But a technological silver bullet has not arrived. As chapter 17 discusses, even relatively shallow water has remained remarkably opaque. So, if a degree of certainty against the littoral mine threat is desired, the issue becomes one of how many resources (for instance, in terms of aircraft or countermeasure ships) should be devoted to the problem. Currently the U.S. Navy has elected to focus on organic minehunting capabilities from existing oceangoing platforms. While this can afford more protection to a deep-water fleet, it can provide little to solve the antiamphibious assault mines in the surf zone.

Unilateral Solutions

If the sea mine threat is as difficult a threat as presented above—and continues to be proliferated during this era of globalization—it seems logical that the United States should devote considerable thought and resources to solving the mine problem. This is not simply a naval issue; it is a joint military issue, since most ground force combat vehicles and Army and Air Force sustainment logistics must travel by sea in any power projection scenario. There are at least three potential unilateral methods toward a near-term solution to the mine threat: a declaratory policy of preemption; a substantial increase in minehunting/clearing research and development; and a substantial increase in mine countermeasure forces and capabilities.

Preemption. In terms of operational effectiveness, the best way to prevent the use of sea mines in an antiaccess/area denial strategy against U.S. maritime forces would be to prevent the mines from ever being laid. Of course, since sea mines must be laid largely before the commencement of hostilities in order to be effective, destroying minelayers would require a preemptive or prehostilities strike. This is a policy that has been advocated by individual senior naval officers (as evident from chapter 17), but not one with which political leaders have been comfortable. Unless U.S. and/or allied decisionmakers were convinced that war with a state (or nonstate actor) was inevitable, it is unlikely that they would order a preemptive strike on ships or aircraft involved in minelaying. But they might be more inclined to do so if there was an existing declaratory policy that the United States would automatically take such action. Arguably, this is in consonance with the Bush administration’s recently released National Security Strategy.

There are certainly precedents in international law that could be used to justify a preemptive attack on any vessel or aircraft laying mines in international water. As noted in chapter 18, the existing International Law of the Sea would appear to mandate action in these circumstances. Since almost any type of watercraft can lay mines, it may be difficult to gather intelligence in a timely enough fashion to prevent actual emplacement. However, a declaratory policy that includes a defined, assured response against the state or nonstate organization perpetrating the mining may have a deterrent effect. Mine laying in international waters could be perceived in the same manner as piracy—that any state aware of such action is empowered to act against the perpetrator. This would appear in consonance with the Hague Conference of 1907.

Such a policy would have little effect on mine laying as part of emplacing antiaccess defense within a state’s own territorial waters, making it ineffectual against the rationale of globalized mine proliferation. It would require a multilateral agreement banning sea mines to justify the violation of sovereignty needed to stop coastal mine seeding.

Increase in Research and Development. As noted in chapter 17, detection of any object under the sea is a difficult art. But there is a significant difference between submarines and sea mines: mines do not (or are not supposed to) move. Thus, there is always the potential that substantial increase in minehunting/clearing research and development—particularly research and development involving space-based means of detection—might have considerable effect in blunting the mine threat. There have been experiments using space-based systems, but the amount spent on such research is miniscule in comparison to more favored defense programs. Part of the reason is that counter-sea mine efforts are seen as exclusively a naval problem, to be funded solely within the resources allocated to the Department of the Navy. But as pointed out earlier, sea mines are in effect a joint problem. Arguably, sea mines are actually less of a problem for the Navy in its sea control and land attack roles than they are for the power projection of the Army (and, ultimately, expeditionary air forces). They could be a substantial problem for amphibious forces and the U.S. Marine Corps; however, vertical assault by air from amphibious ships just outside of coastal waters may neutralize the mine threat for the light, self-sustaining Marine forces. All of this points to the need for a joint program, funded in a manner such as ballistic missile defense to ensure the level of resourcing that could spur significant technical advances. Advanced mine countermeasures might be a fruitful area for Department of Defense experimentation and transformation.

Increase in Countermeasure Forces. If sea mines are indeed the number one global antiaccess threat, then a substantial increase in mine countermeasure forces and capabilities would seem to be the logical counter. Currently, the U.S. Navy has avoided that route, opting for organic minehunting capabilities that improve protection for the oceangoing fleet but do relatively little to improve the coastal clearance necessary for amphibious landings or port debarkation.

The relative neglect of mine forces has become something of a tradition for all the reasons discussed earlier—as a lesson learned that has to be continuously relearned. As soon as it is relearned, it seems forgotten. The primary official study of the naval aspects of the Korean War optimistically noted, “There was one residual result of the mine war in Korea. It was to make mine warfare a more dependable career specialty in the United States Navy.”¹³ That statement was probably true for a few years in the 1950s, but it is not a true statement today.

In organizational politics, mine warfare is considered but a subset of expeditionary warfare, which is but a subset (if that) of surface warfare. Rarely does it have a strong advocate within the surface community (whose personnel crew the mine countermeasures ships). In aviation, it is a subset of the helicopter community, which is itself somewhat of a second-class (possibly third-class) branch of the fighter/strike-focused world of naval air. The community on which the mine clearing responsibility inevitably (and perhaps naturally) devolves is the explosive ordnance disposal specialty—a warfare community that has no flag officer billets. All of this adds to a lack of a powerful advocate for mine warfare in the competition for limited defense resources. This neglect makes little sense if sea mines are to be a significant antiaccess threat in the future and argues for more dedicated resources (in both personnel and platforms) for the mission.

Multilateral/Global Solutions

Globalization is about the interconnectedness of human society, with reduced hazard to freedom of trade or movement. Mine warfare is all about disconnecting and hazarding. In the same spirit of the international campaign to ban landmines, it would seem logical that multilateral or global steps could be taken to eliminate the proliferation of sea mines. Three potential global solutions would be an arms control regime to stop the proliferation of sea mines; an outright ban on the production and use of sea mines; and a commitment by the United Nations to take immediate sanctions or police action toward any state or nonstate actor emplacing sea mines in any part of the ocean or littoral.¹⁴

The second option—a ban on the production, trafficking, and use of sea mines—would most closely resemble the efforts of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. However, gaining public interest for such a campaign against sea mines would likely be much more difficult. Although civilian deaths on land as well as sea may have resulted from sea mines—consider Operation Starvation of World War II—there are simply not enough graphic public images such as paraplegic men and women or injured children to stir a strong sense of outrage. Sea mines are not the same sort of media exploitable threat to everyday activity as landmines—particularly in the most unfortunate, war-wracked Third World countries. It is difficult to portray the destructive effects of sea mines on the global economy.

Critics would claim that banning sea mines would be of disproportionate advantage to the U.S. Navy as the world’s last global navy. But that argument could easily be applicable to landmines, which are not needed to defend American territory and whose removal would be of advantage to U.S. power projection forces on land. If the security of the positive benefits of globalization is enhanced by today’s de facto global Navy, then there seems to be no good reason for a global proliferation of sea mines.

The other global solutions do not currently possess much support from proponents of arms control or international organization, but they are not any more difficult to achieve than the host of arms control, disarmament, or confidence building measures currently on the intellectual agenda. (The first option would be an attempt to complete the existing Hague Conference.) Inclusion of a complete ban on sea mines in the existing law of the sea might gain international support, particularly if encouraged by those states most capable of producing advanced mines, such as the United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, and Italy. Sea mines have been particularly destructive in civil wars in coastal states, such as Sri Lanka, so it is quite possible that lesser developed states might be encouraged to join such an agreement. The issues of adherence, verification, and enforcement of controls on sea mines would be no more challenging than those of any other arms control regime.

Conclusion

The sea mine—perhaps the lowest tech of antiaccess weaponry—has become one of the world’s most proliferated weapons (small arms being the most proliferated). Sea mines are also a threat that has not received the attention or resources that is their due. The globalization process would benefit if a stabilizing power, such as the United States, maintained the resources to deal with this threat on a global basis. Doing so is also of obvious tactical benefit to the U.S. Navy and America’s joint armed forces. But increased resources alone would not result in a significant improvement unless there is a corresponding change in the cultural attitude of the joint forces that currently relegates the countermine mission to a relatively low priority. Part of this attitude is left over from the Cold War days in which mine countermeasures was a mission assigned to the smaller NATO allies. But the Cold War is over.

Moving beyond unilateral solutions toward a global regime to eliminate sea mines would be of even greater benefit in the long run. Whether a nongovernmental campaign such as that against landmines can be sparked seems to hinge on the degree to which individuals will come to recognize how much the beneficial activities of globalization are directly or indirectly dependent on the sea.

Thomas R. Bernitt is president of Bernitt Services, a management consulting firm working primarily in the field of demining and environmental remediation. Retiring from the U.S. Navy in 2000, Captain Bernitt’s previous commands included Explosive Ordnance Mobile Unit 5, Explosive Ordnance Group 1, and Naval Weapons Station, Seal Beach. During Operation Desert Storm, then-Commander Bernitt served as primary mine warfare adviser to the naval forces commander, Admiral Stanley Arthur, Commander, 7th Fleet. Early in his naval career, he directed American and Egyptian divers in demining operation in the Suez Canal. He earned masters degrees in history, national security affairs, and business administration, and is an adjunct professor at several universities. As a surface warfare officer, Captain Sam J. Tangredi has spent his operational career avoiding mines.

Notes

¹ The 76 countries and regions in which mine clearance operations were carried out during 2000 and early 2001 are Abkhazia, Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus, Burma Myanmar, Cambodia, Chad, Chechnya, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Estonia, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, India, northern Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Laos, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Federal Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Mauritania, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nagorno-Karabakh, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam, Western Sahara, Yemen, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. See International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Landmine Monitor Report: Toward a Mine Free World, Executive Summary, Mine Clearance section, September 12, 2001, accessed at <www.icbl.org/lm2001/exec/hma.html#Heading680>. [BACK]

² Moritz von Jacobi, a Prussian émigré who worked at the Russian Committee on Underwater Experiments, is credited with designing the first practical mine, although many others, including American David Bushnell, the “father” of the submarine, have been given recognition. An interesting depiction of torpedo (mine) warfare in the War of 1812 can be found in James Tertius De Kay, The Battle of Stonington: Torpedoes, Submarines and Rockets in the War of 1812 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1990). [BACK]

³ See E.B. Potter, Sea Power: A Naval History (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1981), 235. Interview conducted by Thomas R. Bernitt with Charles Hayden, U.S. Navy participant in the North Sea Barrage, December 1975. [BACK]

⁴ Gregory K. Hartmann, Weapons That Wait (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1979), 55. [BACK]

⁵ Ibid., 78. [BACK]

⁶ The basic design had not changed since 1904. [BACK]

⁷ Hartmann, 81. [BACK]

⁸ Ibid., 231. [BACK]

⁹ Surface sea mines covertly deployed by Libya in the Red Sea from commercial ships in the 1980s were not moored but allowed to float, which eliminated the weight of the mooring device and the effort required for mooring. [BACK]

¹⁰ Based on such specifics as the ship’s size, design characteristics, composition of materials, and, at times, even the location of its construction. [BACK]

¹¹ The requirement for an air cavity, necessary for buoyancy, reduces the available space within the mine for explosives. [BACK]

¹² Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1984), 305. [BACK]

¹³ Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson, The Sea War in Korea (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1957), 220. [BACK]

¹⁴ In proposing “global solutions” via an arms control process, we are proceeding in a similar spirit as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. This opens the chapter to criticism from both sides of the arms control argument. On the one hand, it can be argued that arms control regimes have never actually worked during times of war (the Hague agreements on mines did not in World War I or subsequent wars), and to develop a sea mine ban is but a deceptive fiction. This criticism can also be leveled at the recent treaty to ban landmines—an effort supported most vocally by European nations and Canada (who presumably have a sophisticated understanding of the effectiveness of treaty law) and considered of sufficient merit to earn a Nobel Peace Prize. On the other hand, it could be argued that a ban on sea/littoral mines would prove a “military advantage” to naval powers as the United States—as if such an advantage somehow lessens the moral principles on which the case for arms control is publicly argued by most proponents. The same military advantage case can also be made against bans on landmines. In garnering publicity, any movement for a ban on sea/littoral mines would suffer from a lack of widely publicized photographs of children being blown up by mines washed ashore on beaches (or planted in the surf zone) or drowned merchant sailors.[BACK]