(vanvlak @ May 15 2007,00:08)
QUOTE
Call me daft, but I sympathise with the colonel. It's a small step away from using an animal (and in the future, that step will be shorter still), and another small step away from using a human considered to be expendable. There are simpler and better and cheaper ways to get rid of mines.
Before the job at the engineering firm I have now I actually spent the last few years working for a company that provided unexploded ordnance disposal, land mine remediation and chemical weapons safety consulting services.
We were actually bidding on a Canadian government de-mining contract in Afghanistan but in the end the government decided to fund local de-mining ops on the theory that even if 90% of the allocated money was lost to graft you'd still see more real results hiring Afghans than Westerners.
To put things in perspective one of our techs would pull around $10,000 USD per month where an Afghani with a similar amount of experience would pull bout $200 USD per month. Which in relative terms is probably comparable to the Canadian salary but...
Not to mention that in absolute terms and Afghan is cheaper to replace than a $150,000 USD robot after an explosion. And that unfortunately is a very real concern in countries where land mines have been heavily seeded.
Not very polite to admit but none the less a working truth.
And as far as the animals go I believe that at least one country is using Tanzanian Rats as land mine sniffers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3123119.stm
Really the cheapest method is still plain old fashioned human clearance once the field is identified.