Gurdur

No, it's evasion which is silly.
You contradict yourself.
First you say there should be regulation.
Then you use a strawman to claim regulation is pointless.
You must decide what your stance is.
Oh gosh, another strawman.
Broad decisions as to what types of weapons are allowable are not made legally by field commanders, and often not in practice eithe, but are made by nations.
See the Geneva Convention, and the other treaties on the limitations of biological and gas weapons.

HaysooChreesto!

I tire of your tediousness. If you can't grasp the context of what others write, I can't help you.

elwoodblues

Are the proponents of landmine regulation here willing to endorse an exception for landmines along the N Korea/S Korea border? Given that much, I'd happily sign on to it.

Loren Pechtel

Rules that have specific exemptions in them like this are generally a bad idea.

Rather, they should be permitted in clearly marked fields which are to be cleaned up by the party who laid them after the conflict is over. The borders of such fields must be filed with the UN within one month of their laying, as well as information as to in general what sort of mines were used.

Coleman Smith

The use of both offensive and defensive mines has a long military history and the rationale for the continued use of mines can be found at:

Land Mines:Arguments for their Continued Use
The fact is that mines save the lives of solders and are effective in forcing enemy solders into killing fields.

The reference to razor wire replacing mines shows an ignorance of the purpose of mines.

Mines serve as both a deterrent and as a lethal weapon.

Razor wire can be seen.

I want the enemy to find my mines by accident.

A big advantage is that the enemy does not know where the mines are until it is too late. Hopefully, by that time he will be well into the field which should be protected by airbursting artillery, mortars with anti-personnel air bursting shells and, if within range, machine guns.

Associating trip flares with mines enhances their potential since it serves as a pointer to the enemy�s position at night, lights up the enemy and makes the enemy a sitting duck.

Hopefully the enemy will be compassionate enough to attempt a rescue of the wounded compatriot so you can slaughter the lot of them.

This is the reason effective anti-personal mines should be sub-lethal. If you kill enemy solder you have taken out one solder. If you blow his foot off it will take at least four others to try and get him off the battlefield and the enemy will have to allocate resources for his medical treatment. Personnel and funds allocated for medical treatment is not avail for the direct war effort.

Hideous wounds may have a demoralizing effect on the enemy and may hasten the end of the war.

I have no regard beyond contempt for those who suggest that mines are immoral.

They are no more or less moral than shooting a young shoulder in the face with a machine gun.

Those who wish to whine about morality of mines should address them selves to the politicians who get us into wars. The solders always fight at the pleasure of the politicians and have no capacity to make war with out them.

Tell me the last time a politician declared a war and then reported to the front.

It�s not going to happen.

They send some one else�s sons as their proxy.

Coleman Smith

Aerion

Nuclear weapons are illegal and for a reason. Nukes cause huge damage to massive areas and renders the area of the blast radioactive for decades.

Biological weapons can get out of control and kill many more people than intended. Neither is an equal comparison.

Mines can be dangerous to civilians if minefields are abandoned and/or not marked to warn.

Everyone here pretty much agrees that the use of mines needs some rules to protect civilains and to prevent mine fields from being abandoned.


Just because there is a large campaign, that doesn't mean the subject of the campaign is 100% just. There is such as thing as responsible use of mines to save lives. Pity those who would regulate mines are so closed mined to that concept that they prevent a compromise from being reached that might save civilian lives.

Gurdur

Mines are considered as being made illegal and for a good reason.
Nonsense. You've missed the point, which is a basic ethical comparison.
My, my, my.
You're claiming the critics of landmines are supposed to be at fault --- another typical strawman.
The USA could, for instance, long since started building in time-limit self-destruct measures into its own landmines --- as well as putting pressure on every other manufacturer to do the same.
Now explain why it hasn't.

Aerion

Strawman alert! This does not validate the comparison between nukes and landmines.


Yes, I'm claiming those who would rather not compromise and therefore prevented a treaty that would have regulated and restricted land mines are at fault. Half a loaf is better than none at all.



As I said above, if those who want to make the world safer from landmines had compromised and worked for these proposals, they probably would have succeeded. Land mines probably won't go away so it makes mores sense to regulate than attempt to piss in the wind.

Ut

Actually, I'm quite surprised military companies aren't lobbying hard on that one. It would ensure them of a higher volume of sale and they could probably justify charging a higher price per unit. And it could give them a PR boost needed to prevent this segment of their business from disappearing.

slept2long

So currently we lay out mine fields strategically and chart them all. Do we still just drop them outta planes where charting them is impossible? I am wndering to what effect the U.S.'s use of them has been changed in recent maybe not so recent years.


I could see there worth when a few people need to defend against a greater number of soldiers but when they are simply used to mark off a permanent border, the DMZ seems to fit that description, wouldn't a wall be better?

Interesting information Lamma. We agree that leaving them behind is unacceptable. I wonder if the U.S. has tried to look for alternatives and if we've found any?