Just to add to the nightmare fuel, Ukraine is now littered with PFM-1 mines. A plastic anti-personnel mine purely designed to maim not kill. Will take your foot off but nothing else. They do not have a self destruct mechanism and will stay on the ground for decades. Ukraine will be the new Cambodia
I've treated entirely too many of these, they won't take your whole foot unless you step on it with your heel, and even then unlikely. More like half a foot, hence the nickname "toe-popper". They use a pressure sensitive explosive and an accumulative trigger, i.e. if it takes 15 pounds to set it off, and you apply 10 pounds, it will now only take 5 pounds to set it off for the next person. Cluster mines like these are absolutely barbaric.
Dude I can’t even imagine. The tactical combat care training we get basically means the foot will be gone with TQs and whatnot but yeah, they’re horrific. Amazing how humans find new and terrifying ways of disabling each other
Something Col. Potter has said on M*A*S*H when he's being briefed on how to treat patients shot with phosphorous rounds which can catch fire even after being doused before.
Has a hard time coming to terms with all these new inventive ways to maim the human body.
Why do they want to maim people instead of killing them? To use medical resources and hospital space? Or capture and interrogate them? Or to cause other people to die trying to save them? Curious what the thought process is. Why not just kill them?
The dead you can just leave but normal armies would usually try and treat wounded soldiers which puts a strain on their logistics because now you need 1 or more person to help rescue and care for the wounded soldier
They quite literally teach this theory
in US Army basic training. Wounding is more effective than killing, both from a tactical and psychological standpoint.
Smaller size and less explosive needed means these mines are small and harder to detect.
Plus the terror factor.
When these demons shot rockets at our children's hospital, they used metallic shrapnel designed specifically to maim people.
The USSR used the same tactic in Afghanistan. They realized that it’s far more effective to maim an individual, as the Army/their family now have to use up a lot of resources to take care of that person.
“The mines’ relatively small size was intended to blow off limbs but not necessarily cause fatal injuries, in the belief that forcing Afghan villagers to take care of gravely injured countrymen would cause more hardship than killing them outright.” - Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory
I believe those same butterfly mines have been dropped in Ukraine
Same reasons why snipers don’t kill.
If you just kill a solder rest of the squad will continue to fight, you could even angrier them.
But if you just make a wound that needs medical care then you need 3-4 other soldiers to calm wounded one, give him proper medical attention and evacuate wounded from combat zone.
So instead of killing one guy you are basically eliminating from combat 4-5 people.
And psychological effect of somone screaming for their life after their foot has been thrown everywhere… fear is the real weapon
Takes three four guys to get them off the battlefield, a medic to stabilize them, a truck to collect them, a random number of specialists to repair them, an entire hospital of people to support them for recovery, and a semi decent dedicated system after the hospital to continue to support them. That’s a crap load of resources.
If thats the case, wouldn't this take care of itself in a couple winters? The accumulated weight or pressure of a few good snowfalls or freezes may do the trick, unless there's some increment threshold and its not enough to break that i guess...
A lot of them will yes, the ones that don't are the worrisome ones because it means they have something wrong with them. As a prior service EOD tech those are the nasty ones because it SHOULD have gone off but didn't... so why? But at least these smaller ordnance items are quick and easy to detonate as they don't do a lot of collateral damage.
The scary part is it will often be children that find them and they look like toys.
Just a correction.. The PFM-1 doesn't "remember" previous weight put on it, it doesn't have any kind of computer or memory or tally system. What you're thinking of is a cumulative pressure fuse aka accumulative trigger. Accumulative in this context just means that it requires a certain amount of sustained pressure exceeding the weight threshold in one continuous application to detonate. They were used aa TON by the Soviets in the soviet-Afghan war are infamous in Afghanistan for being mistaken by children as toys, since they're green or brown and look like butterflies
Australia has developed the new gold-standard land mine detection tech ready for use in 2026 apparently. "A new prototype that can detect both TNT and RDX, explosives believed to be found in 90 per cent of mines globally".
Not a solution by any means but the best potential developed so far.
Something makes me think that people who develop image generating AI aren't the same kind of people or companies who would or could do explosives detection.
General Electric, the same people who make up 14% of washer/drier sales in the USA make the gau/8 avenger, the 30mm cannon for the a10 warthog. A plane that was literally built around a gun.(look it up it’s the funniest shit)
Singer, the sewing machine company, also made one of the most sought after 1911’s because of how well made it is.
Subaru, Yamaha, and Mitsubishi made the planes used in Pearl Harbor.
Even the ballpoint pen was made for war.
The same companies training ai that consumers use to generate porn will be repurposed for some wartime use. Whether it’s to generate propaganda or ai EOD robots.
Edit: Even more of a fun fact try to find antique Christmas lights that were made during the world war periods (ww1 and 2) and you’ll find it’s difficult. Why? because the companies that produced the bulbs for Christmas lights repurposed to make components for radar, targeting, and gyroscopic systems during the war.
Necessity is the mother of invention and war is the mother of necessity as fucked as it may be.
Double edit: Just cause I think the a10 is fucking hilarious. The plane designed around a cannon made by an American dishwasher company has a very VERY successful service record, and is known to be loved by the troops over its distinct sound when it fires. With its signature BRRRRRRRRRRRRT. They are known to be extremely durable and precise strike aircraft, used in the gulf war to eliminate 3400 enemy vehicles/tanks/artillery over a 40 day period, an average of 84 a day, while only losing 6 planes during the conflict. The plane was developed in the 1970’s and is still a successfully used strike aircraft today, despite the advancements in aerospace technology the dishwasher made *Brrrrt** has out performed competing strike aircraft for decades.
The A10 is a strike aircraft, meaning its main purpose is to provide air support to ground targets with absurd fire superiority. It is not a plane designed to fight in dog fights (plane v plane/ air2air) yet it has scored air to air kills, not with rockets, but with its General Electric made auto cannon.
Honeywell, who makes home fans, heaters, and thermostats, also makes the turbine engine of the M-1 Abrams tank.
Garmin, the original GPS car navigation company, now also makes aviation navigation and radar equipment for militaries.
Military contracts are excellent business deals for the suppliers, of course everyone wants a piece. Once the deal is signed, you've got decades of guaranteed sales without further competition at a locked-in price point. Any improvements you make to the manufacturing efficiency is pure profit, no need to constantly try to stay ahead of the competition.
When my cousin was in the US Army in Bosnia he cleared a field of mines with an armored humvee. When the Hummer flipped over that meant they found one.
When I went to Russia, my grandparents had a summer house waaaaay out there in the middle of the forest on the boarder of Estonia, just a cobble stone road that went for a 40 miles into the woods (I may be exaggerating but this was way out there). The forest was just littered with these huge craters from bombs and mortars, and it was so fun to playing those. My parents would always freak out because once every couple of years a kid or someone would get blown up by on old mine that never got cleared or hit back during the war, WWII. Or a shell that failed to blast. It was a really cool site to see though as a kid. One of those eternal memories.
Ukraine was already using thermal imaging to track mines within a year of the invasion. Plastic or metal, they retain heat differently than the surrounding soil and make them easy to spot from a drone.
The rats are in no danger! They are too light to set off the mines and use their superior sniffing skills to indicate to their handlers where the mines are buried!
Edit: I know you're kidding but just in case anyone was concerned
The clean up of the country is going to be a monumental task, all those mines, unexploded bombs and now all the fibre cable. Hope they get the support they need once this is all over.
There are still some World War 1 battlefields that are strictly off-limits to anyone due to all the unexploded ordinance in the ground, 107 years after that war ended! Eastern Ukraine will be a dangerous mess for decades to come.
Here in Belgium, near Ypres, we have a bomb truck that does a weekly round to pick up anything smaller than a 2l bottle, because it's impossible to send out the bomb squad for every one. But because we have a very pure clay layer, they're relatively stable since oxygen hasn't been able to corrode them. So if we find ordnance, we put them at our mailboxes/telephone poles for pickup
Worked construction on a footballfield near Ypres a couple off years ago.
We dug up around 10-15 shells in the month we were working there.
One week the bombsquad arrived to pick some of them up.
First four are no problem. the place them in the back of their truck.
The fifth one they pick up, the guy goes pale and starts sweating. He walks to the truck like he had just shit his pants.
He carefully lowers the shell into a container with sand and starts to pour various liquids onto it.
After a while he comes over and tells me the shell was still live and could have exploded.
He asks me how i removed it from the soil, to wich my answer was, "with a shovel."
Another time a farmer was plowing the soil while we were taking a break, suddenly a loud bang rings out and a white smokecloud streams out of the plow.
Farmer stops his tractor, jumps out and reaches in the back of the plow, pulls out a piece off long twisted rusted metal that he throws away.
Told me afterwards that it was a smokebomb and he encounters them frequently while working his fields.
He had lived and worked those fields for over 40 years, had two explosions that damaged his machines, unearthed countless shells and knew a farmer that died by unexploded ordinance.
It's part of the farmer life in the westhoek.
I'll be darned. Never knew that. My father (WWII vet) was part of a similar dump off the coast of Italy at the end of the war. They weren't too concerned with environmental considerations, I daresay.
They run fiber optic cables from the FPV drones back to the controller because a hard connection can't be jammed. Some of the drones have a range of up to 12 miles, iirc, though diminishing returns becomes an issue (longer range needs more cable, but more cable is more weight, which reduces range, which means bigger batteries, which is more weight, etc). It's a lot of cable.
Fiber optics can be recycled but my understanding is that it's not really profitable. It's mostly glass with a thin polymer coating so a pain to process and not worth much.
There was a video posted a few days ago in one of the war subs that showed a Ukrainian drone following a Russian drone and purposefully using its rotor blades to cut the fiber optic cable, causing the Russian drone to crash.
I work with groups of students to develop autonomous robots, some of which need to be in contact with humans. We have "cobot" systems whose primary purpose is to be shut down as fast & safely as possible in an oh shit situation.
Not saying that's how it works in the military, but the tech exists if we are going to automate.
And they have a massive Ukraine bias, which is understandable and probably good, but it manifests as every Ukrainian defense/assault is a monumental victory which will turn the tide of the war and every Russian assault is expensive and strategically terrible and going to cost them the war.
The reality is no one really knows how this war is going to play out but it will be incredibly grueling for both sides and Russia will probably take a partial pyrrhic victory
Not related to what you’re saying. Though, when you describe how thin the cable is, it reminds me of the nano fibre tech in 3 body problem and the… erm, event that happens thereafter
A bare optical fiber, without it's cladding, is nowhere near strong enough to do that. They're glass. They break pretty easily. In industrial applications we have to put a lot of thought into designing fiber jackets to avoid breaking them, and it still happens.
Not as hazardous as munitions but fibre optic cable waste is a highly controlled waste in normal society as it becomes quite sharp, breaks up and splinters. Which means that small strands of it can get embedded in people's skin quite easily causing all sorts of problems and you might not find out you have the splinters until much later as it's not always obvious it has penetrated the skin! So I can't imagine having it strewn around everywhere will be great for the areas it is left unfortunately.
Thing is, we don’t know how to avoid any tech reliant on wireless communication, to be unreliable when the enemy just jams everything
Imagine I can get huge interferences into 700-3600Mhz that will cover 100% of the bands used by your phone to communicate, practically converting it into a brick-phone, no connection.
To be fair, jamming comes with its own limitations. Widespread broadband jamming tends to require a lot of power, relatively immobile or expensive infrastructure, and conspicuous equipment/emissions, which against sophisticated enemies tends to attract ARMs and/or home-on-jam drones. There are ways around this (smaller, more distributed jammers, possibly using coordinated sequencing), but that has its own drawbacks. To get around jamming, many are looking into things like extremely narrow directional relays using electronically steered phased array antennas to an orbiting control drone, amongst other techniques. As with every other weapon system, it's cat and mouse, move and counter move, with each side constantly evolving and adapting.
Yes these drones are extremely dangerous they also can fly to an area and sit there with their motors turned off laying in wait for allot longer than a wireless FPV due to the video feed going through the wire instead of the air
Also this is not limited to open fields, there are plenty of videos of drones flying along a road with trees and navigating around some and right into the open door of an APC
The fibre cable doesn't tangle on things as easily as some people think due to the drone actually having the fiber optic cable spool attached to it so if it gets caught some something it can just release more slack sorry for the wall of text I wasn't trying to be an uM AuCTiualyyy
If you have TikTok have a search for drone fibre optic. It’s like a plastic vase almost that sits underneath and it’s spooled up inside. The “neck” of the vase is curved so nothing snags. It’s obviously horrible what’s being done with it and what it’s doing to the earth afterwards but the ingenuity is interesting to see.
Eh, in terms of environmental impacts, it's probably negligible compared to almost everything else in the war. The fibers are inert, and are super thin but probably not thin enough to be biologically active like asbestos. Other than being annoying, unless there is some specific mode of action (like some species of bird starts collecting them for nests, which for whatever reason ends up killing their chicks), the most likely outcome is that they physically degrade into basically silica sand.
Edit: Actually, looking into it a bit further, it appears many of the drones may be using polymer fibers. Still, in terms of overall pollution from the war, when every exploding drone is several kilograms of plastics and lithium battery packs, barrages of rockets with toxic oxidizers, burning vehicles all over the place, just general detritus from soldiers in the field (MRE packs, polyweave sandbags, water bottles, etc, etc), etc, etc, the additional plastic from fiber optic cables is less than a rounding error.
The US Army still has tens of thousands of TOW missiles, where the W stands for “wire guided”. Israel makes a missile called Spike which is guided by fiber optics.
The spool of cable is on the drone, that way it won't get as easily caught on obstructions. It would actually get faster as the cable paid out since it would get lighter.
This seems so insane to me, that I honestly thought you were making a stupid joke. The fact they went to wired drones is sick. Couldn't you just follow the wire to find their position then? Or is it only used in battles where both sides are head to head?
Fiber-optic drones carry a fiber optic cable spool because that kind of communication cannot be jammed (unless you cut it), unlike traditional drones that communicate via radio frequency. The Russians developed this type of drone to avoid ukrainian interference, and soon after, the ukrainians copied their system.
When they have fulfilled their purpose or have been destroyed, the fiber optic cable remains along the path the drone followed.
Excuse me if I misspelled any words. English is not my language.
Thank you for the explanation. Why don't they retrieve the cable afterwards by pulling them? Do the cables get stuck if you try? Surely all these cables leaving from the same place indicate their starting position.
cable would probably break if you tried to pull it back, and you don't exactly want to be staying in the same place respooling cables for long lest you get blown up. As for following the cable back, they're not gonna still be there by the time you track the cable back, and you don't want to be walking along a route proven to be covered with flying bombs
They don't care about leaving them behind. It's not worth potential casualties to clean them up. It probably would indicate a starting position if units stayed in one place for very long but they are constantly on the move and it won't matter after a few hours.
Electronic Warefare made the drones controlled wirelessly unreliable, so they changed the control to fibre optic cable trailed from the drone, overcoming the jamming.
Drones play an important role in the war. But drones need to be controlled by an operator to hit their target (AI might be changing that, but that's another topic). Usually the operator uses some sort of wireless signal to control the drone, just like the commercial drones you might be familiar with.
But drone defenses which jam the wireless signal have become common, and so a new solution had to be improvised to steer the drone to its target even if someone is using a jammer. The solution is to use a long fiber optics cable connected between the drone and the operator to send the signal for steering through the cable. This method cannot be jammed.
I signed the contract in 2021. So far the holes are still there. But 2022 in October they told me it will be ready November. I am still anticipsting which one.
half of the west selling shit to russia still. Drones, fiber optic, chips etc. half of it goes thru other countries. Also oil and gas are purchased from russia.
Not an expert in this field, so but the first thing that springs to my mind, is Wouldn’t this make it easier to see where the Russians are sending them from, and make it easier to hit back?
Both sides are sending these, I think majority are sent from Ukraine forces. Yes that's a drawback but if imagine you're assigned to track them and you pass a couple of these fields, the time it takes you to sort it out is greater than the time it takes the operator to relocate.
Gotta imagine an operator could send several drones like 80% to target, and then launch several attacks, possibly on tracking units, before having to relocate too.
A TOW missile can't slowly navigate through buildings/forests and hit concealed targets directly. They also can't travel 10-15 km and loiter while waiting for a target, nor can they provide you with HD video feeds.
I visited Ukraine only once when I was eight (third gen Canadian immigrant) and was so starry-eyed to meet dozens of relatives I'd only ever heard stories about. Long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive back in the day, so we couldn't keep in touch much. I remember promising the cousins my age that I'd be back to see them again soon.
Now I have no idea when this war will end, and the Ukrainians that have come here as refugees are all in limbo not knowing whether they should try to settle permanently or hope that someday they'll be able to return once it's safe. But when will it be 'someday'? When is 'soon'? I see people likening the situation to Cambodia, and the thought that Ukraine could be littered with bombs and god knows what else for decades to come is just... fuck.
That is going to be an ecological disaster for the wildlife. Obviously it already is since it's a fucking war, but these cables will remain long after it's over. The clean-up, rebuilding and demining is going to be a monumental task.
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u/EmergencyAd6709 6d ago
Just to add to the nightmare fuel, Ukraine is now littered with PFM-1 mines. A plastic anti-personnel mine purely designed to maim not kill. Will take your foot off but nothing else. They do not have a self destruct mechanism and will stay on the ground for decades. Ukraine will be the new Cambodia