Afghan Bridge Update and Sad News

Time tested method is to herd sheep over the area. The Russians used troops that lacked dicipline.

Free men own guns - www(dot)geocities(dot)com/CapitolHill/5357/

Sorry to hear about your loss. There is nothing that comes to mind that you can do that is easy and works 100%.

i

If you hooked that R/C system up to a humvee with realistic looking passengers, maybe that would work. AKA Bait.

I suspect that jamming to deny the trigger signal is being used along with freq sweeping to try to trigger IED a head of convoy.

If you see an afghan walking down the road, offer him a ride. Gage his reaction.

Try to win the hearts and minds of the locals. They know things.

Thank all of you for your service.

Wes

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote: Ken,

Thank you for what you are doing.

I sure wish I had an answer. I don't, but I'll think about it. Foreman is a good one to ask too - he is one of the most creative folks I've ever met, and I've met a bunch of them.

Fitch

This sounds like a remotely triggered device. Is that the threat, or does "pressure plate" mean they trigger on contact?

Have we recovered and disarmed live bombs? It would all depend on the sophistication and variations in design. My guess is that they are contact activated and we simply need something other than our soldiers to push on them. That could take the form of a computer operated and armored ATV or something to go ahead of you, at least in the open areas.

Ditto!

Bill

--Google on "inductive loop mine detector" for starters and you'll see a fair number of clever ideas. I'm thinking something like this could probably be mounted on, or dragged behind an R/C car. Data could be transmitted to another location. With robotics at their current state it would be possible to teach a vehicle to sweep an area thoroughly and map the output. --Several years ago I lead a team that played around with third world methods for dealing with mine clearing but since then the available cheap electronics have greatly increased the possible routes to a solution.

Boy o boy - what a problem. They trigger those damn things every way there is a trigger I think.

Cell phones, timers, pressure plates, Achmed with a toggle switch on a long wire.

Short term solution - Sure wish I knew one. Be interesting to know the results of projecting a bigass focused EMP field 20 feet in front of the vehicle.

I think power requirements and cycle time would prohibit running one all the time, but a crew could have a fire button to hit when passing suspicious roadside stuff.

Would a Radio controlled small white pickup truck 90 feet in front of an APC be a useful sensor mount? Inflatable plastic driver behind the wheel.....

Long term solution: Airstrikes on every mullah that preaches JIHAD! against the great and lesser satan.

Markshere2

A Toast to the Living A Drink to the Dead

To Absent Friends!

Gunner, "Sua Sponte"

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

I'm reminded of WWII era mine-bashing tank accessories - a drum on long arms in front of the tank, with many pieces of chain, and the whole drum spun up to beat the ground and clear a swath. For pressure-plate type detonators, that should do as well as anything, and should be a known (if not current) technology. Presumably the drum takes some damage, and is made to be cheap and easily replaceable.

I suspect there are several problems with reliably getting the damn things to go off with electricity or magnetics. Presumably, at the silly end of the scale, you could keep tossing neutron bombs and that ought to fix them, but with somewhat problematic side effects. As there are going to many variants, finding something that will manage to set off one is not likely to manage to set off others, and anything that will have enough energy to possibly pull it off is probably going to take something more like a remote-control humvee to have enough power to run it. Then you have the problem of remotely controlling something that is actively trying to send out a huge amount of interference (so perhaps it's controlled via cable, not radio), and the effects of that interference on communications, etc.

Unfortuatly..most IEDs are command detonated, least thats the word I get from the sand box.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

some suggestions:

1. if in a cell phone area, there are cheap commercial cell phone detectors - use one of them to detect cell phone triggered devices
2. disassemble microwave oven, make horn to direct micorwaves downward, move the device (fairly slowly) over suspect ground - microwaves are likely (not guaranteed) to hurt detnoation electronics

Unfortunately, the I in IED means "improvised". That means it's difficult to predict what might detonate one unless it's known that many or most are "improvised" in the same or similar ways. A purely mechanical (no electric stuff inside) pressure plate initiator pretty much only responds to pressure.

The only universal way I know of to detonate something before the improvisor intended it to happen is by sympathetic detonation -- pop HE on or very near it.

If it is metal, then it might be either detonated or neutered by making it hot, which could be done by microwave or RF induction -- but that'd take far more power than batteries could sustain.

Other ways of countering them also deserve thought: locate them and avoid them, or if manually fired then locate and destroy the lurker before he or she can plunk the magic twanger. Gets complicated when the lurker is a child, don't know if you're seeing any of that or not.

Not at all complicated. You just dont have to lead em as much as an adult.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

The most effective method of getting rid of IEDs is a good strafing of the road immediately before traveling it. Spray the road and both sides well with a good shower of lead to detonate anything in range. Only problem is collateral damage - it liquidates anyone already on the road, friend or foe.

The only really reliable way to trip a pressure plate is to trip the pressure plate. And they can always rig up a remote bypass and only flip it on as the truly tempting vehicle approaches.

If you ever watched Mythbusters, you know it's fairly easy to rig up a car with a garden variety radio control on the gas, steering and brakes. With a little ingenuity you can do the same to a Humvee, and a little ingenuity can cover the shifter and other auxiliaries.

Take an un-armored Hummer and rig it to remote control from an Up-Armored rig a car or two back in line, with dummies in the front seats to fool the remote trigger folks.

Might even take a second remote control and rig it to the Ma Deuce on the back - but you need multiple video links (wide angle and aiming point) to do that right...

Any experimental inductive trigger coils are going to need serious power to run them. Generator in the back seat will do it.

Might be more effective to just hang a big metal detector coil off the front of the remote-control lead car - when you drive over the IED made of old artillery shells it'll scream like a banshee, and you can let the EOD guys decide if it's a trick or a treat...

Or "borrow" a skid-steer loader from the Seabees, toss a bulletproof windshield and some armor plate around the operator's position, and hang the metal detector loop off the bucket. When you get a hit, retract the loop and dig a hole - the loader bucket should deflect quite a blast. If it's a dry hole you can fill the divot back in and compact it before proceeding.

Could use a backhoe tractor, but the little dipper bucket means armoring the operator position will be far more important.

Too bad you can't call Dig-Alert and have them mark all the mines. ;-) But if there are any working utilities down there, might be a good thing to know about before you start digging holes in the road. Digging into a 35KV power feeder cable or a natural gas main would make a pretty good blast, too.

Remember that the Field Expedient Modification is a time honored tradition, the "Hedge-Chopper" tank attachments from WW-II and the "Flail" style land-mine detonator/clearer being a few famous examples.

You have to be smarter than the enemy. "Your job is not to die for your country - it's to make the other stupid sonofabitch die for his."

Thank you for dealing with the baddies over there, rather than letting them come over here.

-->--

I believe that the standard approach is to do all things at once -- watch the road, use cell phone jammers, send sappers forward, and work with locals for getting tips (could also be a source of trouble).

There is no magic answer as to how to pre-detonate all possible IEDs. The twisted pair wire is quite immune to any sort of interference.

It is a difficult problem, since ingenious local people are willing to take considerable risks and they get paid for all soldiers killed and equipment destroyed.

i

Yep. That's the word we get from Iraq too. 'Round here, the pressure plate varients are by far the most common. Construction varies, but it goes like this... Take an explosive device, anything from homebrewed explosives to antique British and Russian A/T mines. Fuse with electric blasting cap. Bury mine to varying depths. Build a pressure plate from anything conductive which happens to be in the bomb-maker's reach that day. Bury shallow. Connect a couple D-Cells via some scavenged wire, and...wait.

Pressure plates are generally around 18-24 inches long and from 1 to 8 inches wide. Insulators between the plates are anything that won' conduct too much electicity; from pieces of goat hide to bits of rubber. Pressure plate assy. is usually water/sand proofed in some manner. Goat hide, plastic bags, truck innertube, pvc pipe, etc.

Since the pressure plates are generally large, shallow, and not electrically shielded, I was hoping to target them with an induced current. Not as easy as I was hoping, I see. If it were simple, somebody would have figured it out already. Sigh. We'll keep working the problem.

Thank you all for your help and support!

Ken

Google on "mine flail". They should work just dandy on a pressure plate mine.

Should be something a craft shop could put together in a week or so. Mount it on the front of a bulldozer or similar.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

I wonder what a big vibratory soil compactor on a boom would accomplish?

Wes