The armed services are spending billions and billions to figure out fancy new ways to stop improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But the latest trick is an oldie — dating back to World War I — and couldn’t be less high tech.
The contraptions are called mine rollers — sets of wheels mounted in front of a vehicle, basically. When they roll over a mine or a pressure-activated IED, the wheels trigger the bomb. Because the vehicle is some distance behind the rollers, much of the bomb blast wave does not reach the vehicle, dramatically reducing the damage. And the vehicle lives to see another day. The Marine Corps just bought 150 sets from General Dynamics, according to Defense Industry Daily.
This idea sounds glaringly obvious. So you might wonder why it took the military more than 3 years to put the rollers up. In fact, the idea of a mine roller originated in 1918, to help nascent tanks deal with the anti-tank mines of that era. Many of the earliest IEDs in Iraq were built with anti-tank mines. Why didn’t anybody in the Army Engineer School, for instance, make the connection?
Chalk some of it up to military bureaucracy. When it comes to mine-clearance, combat engineers and explosive ordnance disposal techs sometimes have overlapping lines of responsibility. (Which helps fuel an often-bitter rivalry.) At times, who exactly is supposed to develop bomb– and mine-fighting gear has been a blurry question, as well. The Counter-IED Task Force is now supposed to be in charge. But we’ll see.
There are several legitimate concerns with the mine rollers that I am not going to mention here. However, my answer to these concerns are: If the insurgents do that, it would make their IEDs more detectable. Moreover, the standoff will interfere with aiming.
A friend and I were working on a similar concept, a Humvee roller attachment. However, we could not find a machinist to build our prototype. Now that I am deployed, we could not continue our commercial venture. One feature of our design was that it was telescoping, meaning that we can vary the distance of the rollers to the vehicle. We can change the distance to respond to changes in IED tactics. Maybe General Dynamics will incorporate the feature into their next run of mine rollers, too.
– Jimmy Wu
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WWI Mine-Mashers to Iraq
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This is indeed old stuff, and not some of the most effective.
Most mine threat was from roadside bombs so far because you cannot easily hide a pressure mine in concrete roads and so on.
This roller stuff does only help to some degree.
Some mines don’t explode immediately or don’t explode on first pressure, so it’s only a limited protection.
Furthermore, it can easily happen that it did not cover parts of the street that following vehicles touch with their tires.
I don’t expect that this purchase will be very effective…and the fact that it#s purchased from one of the large defense companies insteaad of from some rather small workshop company means that it’s most likely over-priced and eskorted by expensive marketing.
Maybe everyone needs to go forward a little bit in time. Say around 6 June 1944 and a British Officer, Major General Percy C.S. Hobart. He designed equipment that actually worked. They were called Hobart’s Funnies.
What worked then may be able to be adapted here.
As ridiculous as it sounds check out movies, often as not if you see a piece of equipment in a movie that isn’t actually real, in most cases it’s not far off. The DOD was supposedly checking with movie studios, directors and producers on different terrorist plots, why not check with F/X guys on their take. More things have come out of the imaginations of hollywood than some think!
How about a heavily reinforced stel remote controlled vehicle something like a steam roller?
These could be in diffrent configurations. Rather than risking a mans‘ life diffusing a device they could be deliberatley used to set mines off.
I was just at the RC and hobby show here in Chicago. Why not just RC an SUV, load it with bags of sand, concrete, whatever to equal the load to a Humvie’s, put rollers on the front, and send it in advance of all the convoys? With the camera remotes we have now-a-days, the driver needn’t be all that close to the bait car. With the seized rustbuckets that are over in the impound yards, shouldn’t cost too much. We also need more night patrols and surveillance. Catch the buggers while they’re planting and open up on them. We have the night equipment, let’s use it. When they switch to day work, increase the use of in place monitors and cheap UAVs (once again, see RC planes). Put some of those out of work lads to work putting up the poles and lets start putting up cameras. Make it a shoot on site offense to damage one, perhaps. Finally, where we don’t control, I have no problem with bringing in another oldie but goodie, anyone remember Puff the Magic Dragon (DC 3 with Gattlings)?
We will never win their hearts, let’s face that. Better that they fear us then.
Operation Desert sweep 91–93 had many effective innovations abricated by eodwsi rollers plungers etc. seems noone is paying attention to what was already effectively used.I have plenty of pictures of these devices made under my supervision.
My firm has already developed and sold such a retractable frontal hydraulic arm to the Greek Government
Like the WW2 D Day Tank the Funny with those spinning chains fwd of tank to detonate mines– revive those & this system alone.
Send over 400 units to the Army & Marines & test in the National Guard units.
Must have.
& or have as Remote Control Drone Ground.
Nice.
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