BY ANN ROOSEVELT

The Army is deploying new landmine-detection equipment—from handheld detectors to mine-hunting vehicles—to protect ground forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of the most heavily mined nations in the world.

At least one U.S. soldier has died and several have been injured by landmines during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Human rights organizations estimate five million to 10 million mines litter Afghanistan; the number of landmines left in Iraq after two decades of conflict is unknown.

But while Afghanistan has worked with the international community for years on de-mining efforts, "Iraq was much more closed off," said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information. "Saddam Hussein had expelled landmine monitors. So we don't know really know the extent of the damage."

Because of the threat troops face from mines, the Army has accelerated the deployment of the Handheld Standoff Mine Detection System, said Larry Nee, chief of the Countermine Division, office of the project manager for Close Combat Systems at Fort Belvoir, Va.

Built by Cyterra Corp., the handheld detector can find metallic and non-metallic mines.

According to Nee, troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq have the units today. To date, the company has delivered 210 of the detectors.

New vehicles

Given the extent of the problem, vehicles for mine clearance are important as well.

Stohl said there were cases where U.S. troops were driving through Iraq, where "if a Bradley vehicle went off the road ... that one may have found itself surrounded by landmines. That happened a couple of times, because they veered off of the path."

For route clearance, the Army acquired a system called the Interim Vehicle Mounted Mine Detector (IVMMD) from the Rolling Stock Division of South Africa's Dorbyl Ltd. The Army has purchased 10 IVMMD systems.

The system—nicknamed the "Chubby"—consists of the Meerkat vehicle with a mine detector mounted underneath the vehicle with blast protection for the operator. It detects and marks mines. A second vehicle, called the Husky, then moves up, towing mine-detonation trailers.

"We fielded that system to Afghanistan this year," he said, and "there is a set on the way to Iraq."

Also, the Army is buying a suite of equipment for area mine clearance, Nee said. The suite includes Aardvark flails, made by Aardvark Clear Mine Ltd., in Scotland, which bash away at the ground, detonating any mines in its path.

On the way are more mine clearance vehicles such as the Buffalo, Nee said. Built by Technical Solutions Group in Charleston, S.C., it has a hydraulic boom that an operator can use to excavate and move a mine out of the way.

Further, the Army is buying a medium weight route clearance vehicle from South Africa known as an RG-31 Nyala, Nee said.

"We're ready to take delivery on the RG-31 and the Aardvarks here shortly," Nee said. "We've got a little bit of testing to do on the Aardvark before we field it. The RG-31s, we're preparing to ship those as we speak and also the Buffalos. We'll be shipping them shortly."

"The overall strategy is to rely on a layered approach to mine-detection," Nee said. Those layers include everything from intelligence gathering to ground or unmanned aerial vehicle detection, "to try and minimize the burden on any one system."

This summer a draft solicitation will be released for the Ground Standoff Mine Detection System, or GSTAMIDS, Nee said. "We're going to change direction with the program and restructure GSTAMIDS to be responsive to FCS, he said, referring to the Future Combat System.

The new GSTAMIDS will work with Future Combat System unmanned ground platforms. The system would be in a "mule" role, he said, sweeping ahead of soldiers.

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman in March received a contract to build a sensor for airborne mine detection, which would be fitted on the Future Combat System unmanned aerial vehicle, known as the Airborne Standoff Mine Detection System.

Army Countermine Division Director Dick Weaver at Fort Belvoir said future Army forces want to move quickly.

"So the emphasis is on trying to detect them [landmines] well in front of the vehicles," he said. "And the fact that they would like to do this at very high speed on the order of 30 to 40 kilometers an hour means that this places a tremendous burden on detection schemes."

Recent developments offer a "downlooking" radar, which would be mounted in front of the vehicle, looking down at the ground, Weaver said. "We've gotten false alarm rates down to one in a thousand, which is good, but we are operating at speeds that are still very low by Army standards. Probably four or five kilometers an hour."

So researchers are looking at unmanned, robotic ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles.

"That's the only way you can hope to do it at any reasonable rate of speed," Weaver said.

Picture a road with a small, "—20-inches or so—aerial vehicle," with a sensor package that would cue the unmanned ground-sensing vehicle, he said. The aerial sensors would identify suspicious areas on the road. Then the unmanned vehicle would search those areas in detail. "So in the average you can, of course, get your speed up," he said.

Off road, the problem is not normally individual mines, but minefields.

Again, researchers are looking at unmanned aerial vehicles flying at higher altitudes to try to identify the potential minefield and perhaps identify its boundaries, he said.

In the long-term, "the Army would like ... a sensor package or suite that one could actually attach to the new vehicles, the lighter vehicles, that would actually look forward of the vehicle at some distance, let's say 20 or 30 meters in front of the vehicle as it's proceeding, and potentially detect the mines that way instead of having to look straight down," Weaver said.

But the problem is more difficult. "You're not getting the same information back from a target out in front of you that you get when you're looking straight down," he added. "On the other hand, you can get multiple looks at this as you approach it."

The future for handheld detectors is to move the sensors further from the soldier.

"What we're trying to do there is take that same kind of technology, metal detectors and radars and other sensors, and put them on a very small robot, that a dismounted person could control" and put more distance between the operator and the mine, he said.

The problem here is to make the vehicle and sensors light enough so soldiers can carry it around, he said.

"Actually locating these things and finding them precisely" is the most difficult problem, Weaver said. "This is a very simple game in one sense. One of the rules of the road here is for every measure there's a countermeasure. The idea is you would like to make it difficult for them."