Hold That Line: JCS Objections Appear Crucial To Retaining American Right To Use Landmines To Save U.S. Troops’ Lives
(Washington, D.C.): As predicted,
the U.S. Senate’s decision to ratify a
multilateral treaty with the admirable —
but totally unachievable — objective of
effecting a worldwide ban on poison gas
has only served to encourage proponents
of other, utopian arms control
delusions. Preeminent among
these is the proposal now being massively
promoted by a former British
queen-in-waiting, the Red Cross, an
assortment of generally left-of-center
organizations (including the Vietnam
Veterans of America) and a number of U.S.
legislators led by Senator Patrick Leahy
(D-VT): A ban on the production,
stockpiling or use of anti-personnel
landmines (APLs).
At risk of being altogether lost in
the frenzy of hype, do-goodism and
political correctness associated with the
effort to prohibit these weapons —
devices universally portrayed as inhumane
and relentlessly exacting a toll on
innocent civilians — are a few
inconvenient facts:
The U.S. Military Needs
Anti-Personnel Landmines
The United States military uses
anti-personnel landmines in a responsible
manner in order to save American
lives. It employs mines designed to
self-destruct after a short period (4
hours to 15 days), laying them down in
marked areas to protect U.S. forces. Such
use of anti-personnel mines is especially
important when American personnel are
outnumbered — a fact of life in many
combat situations, especially at the
entry of forces into a theater of
operations, and one that is likely to
become still more common as the size of
the Nation’s military shrinks.
In fact, recent studies by the
Army indicate that American casualties
will increase by some thirty percent
if U.S. land forces are obliged to fight
without the use of landmines.
As a result, the images of maimed
children endlessly conjured up by
proponents of the APL ban are not the
only ones to be borne in mind; the
practical effect of such a ban will
probably be to create a great many more
American flag-draped coffins and
body-bags in future conflicts.
What’s an APL?
U.S. anti-personnel mines are
particularly important as a means of
preventing, tampering with or breaching
of anti-tank mines — a weapon system
that would, ostensibly, not be
covered by the proposed ban. Indeed,
fifteen retired general officers —
including General Norman Schwarzkopf —
who wrote an open letter to President
Clinton on 3 April 1997 urging him to
embrace a ban on anti-personnel
landmines, noted that “the
proposed ban…does not affect anti-tank
mines, nor does it ban such normally
command-detonated weapons as Claymore
‘mines,’ leaving unimpaired the use of
those undeniably militarily useful
weapons.” (Emphasis added.)
In fact, the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) — a prime-mover
behind the anti-personnel landmine ban
which is spending millions of dollars
promoting this agenda (at least some of
it likely coming from U.S. government
contributions)(3)
— has expressed strenuous opposition to
a definition that would limit the ban to
those mines “primarily
designed” to injure people. In a 6
January 1997 item on its Website, the
ICRC expressed concern about “the
increased use and rapid development of
high-tech, dual-purpose mines which can
destroy, for example, either a vehicle or
a person.”
In other words, it is
predictable that the present proposal
will come to apply to a great many other
weapon systems, perhaps
including artillery projectiles, mortar
and tank rounds, grenades, bombs or
submunitions that may fail to detonate,
leaving in place unexploded ordnance. At
the very least, the ICRC formula seems
likely to create obligations on the U.S.
military for cleaning up foreign
battlefields where it has been obliged to
fight. The costs associated with such an
obligation are potentially astronomical
and, of course, unbudgeted.
Guess What: There Will
Still be Landmines After a Ban
While banning the use of
anti-personnel landmines by the United
States and other Western states that
employ them responsibly will have a
deleterious effect on those nations’
military operations, such a ban
will do nothing to address the
problem with which its proponents claim
to be concerned. First, one
cannot prohibit the 110 million landmines
currently said to be in the ground in a
half-dozen or so developing nations
scarred by past or ongoing conflicts
(e.g., Cambodia, Afghanistan and Bosnia).
In fact, as Paul Jefferson
— a former British mine disposal officer
and freelance mine-clearer who was
severely wounded by an anti-personnel
mine in Kuwait — wrote in an article
entitled “Why Diana is
Wrong” published by the
London Daily Telegraph on 8
February 1997:
“I am typical of most
mine-clearers — as opposed to
anti-landmine lobbyists, charity
PR spokesmen and journalists —
in that I do not believe
that a ban on landmines will do
anything to help solve the
problem of landmine devastation.
That may sound paradoxical, but
it is true. People do not want to
hear this, but the call
for a mines ban is unworkable,
undesirable and, worse, counter-productive.“The campaign
diverts attention and funds from
the real issue. It
enables governments to claim that
they are spending money on
dealing with the problem of
landmines, whereas in fact they
are spending money on discussing
the problem, on hosting
conferences, on carrying out
‘assessment missions’, on
promoting ‘mines awareness’
campaigns — on almost
everything, in fact, other than
the messy business of actually
getting the mines out of the
ground. (Emphasis added
throughout.)
Second, there
is no reason to believe that
other nations — notably, China,
Russia and Vietnam — whose use or
widespread sale of
anti-personnel landmines has done
much to create the present
humanitarian problem — will join
or comply with a treaty banning
APLs. As Jefferson
notes:
“The proposed ban is
unworkable because producer
nations, especially the Russians
and Chinese, have refused to
consider it. Landmine use is
integral to their military
doctrine; they have long land
borders to defend. It is also
unworkable because AP mines are
so cheap to produce that even a
country such as Vietnam, with its
minimal industrial capability,
can churn them out for
export.”
Under these circumstances, as one Army
officer who wished to remain anonymous
put it: “The decision to
take landmines away from U.S. forces is
like taking firearms away from policemen
because a criminal has used one for an
illegal purpose.” This sort
of moral equivalence is all too evident
among those who might be called
“prohibitionists” — people who
argue, in the words of one, that “If
we cannot prevent war, we will make it
impossible to fight.” Of course,
banning landmines, lasers, poison gas or
even bullets from the arsenals of the
United States and other law-abiding
nations will not make it impossible to
fight wars, just difficult if not
impossible for such nations to win
them at the lowest possible cost.
Put differently, so-called
“international norms” may make
some feel better, but surely not those
who will bear with their lives the price
of such wishful thinking.
Making
U.S. Military Personnel into War
Criminals?
One other consideration is the
likelihood that U.S. combat personnel in
dangerous situations will find ways to
jury-rig hand-grenades or other ordinance
to serve as anti-personnel mines in
order to protect themselves against
surprise attack. A ban on
APLs could transform such actions into
international war crimes — and those who
take these legitimate self-defensive
steps into war criminals. This
absurd prospect can only reinforce
plummeting morale within the armed forces
and further aggravate the problem of
attracting and retaining good men into
the ground combat arms.
The Bottom Line
At this writing, only the
determination of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff appears to be preventing
capitulation on the part of the Clinton
Administration and the Congress to the
campaign immediately to ban all U.S. use
of anti-personnel landmines.
According to yesterday’s New York
Times, both President Clinton and
Vice President Gore have indicated
privately that “they cannot afford
to cross the leaders of the military
branches….” Unfortunately, such
comments seem calculated to increase
pressure on the JCS to abandon their
opposition to an immediate and permanent
ban on APL use rather than a signal of
real solidarity with the uniformed
military on a politically difficult but
principled position. Certainly,
there has been no visible effort made by
either the President, the Vice President,
the National Security Advisor or any
other senior official to support the
Chiefs’ stance.
The Chiefs have recognized that APLs
are absolutely indispensable to the
defense of South Korea and, more
generally, vital to protecting American
troops in exposed positions around the
world. They are to be commended
for displaying to date real courage under
fire — courage surely inspired,
in part, by the knowledge that to do
otherwise would be to place political
expediency above the welfare and safety
of the troops they command. Those troops
and their leadership deserve support, not
second-guessing and mau-mauing, from
civilians in the legislative and
executive branches of the U.S.
government, in the media and among
well-meaning, but seriously misguided,
anti-landmine activists.
– 30 –
1. See the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled Truth or
Consequences #3: Clinton ‘Makes a Mistake
About It’ In Arguing The CWC Will Protect
U.S. Troops (
February 1997), Clinton’s
C.T.B. And Other Placebos Won’t Stop,
Will Compound The Danger Of Proliferating
Weapons Of Mass Destruction
(No. 96-D
90, 24 September 1996), Will
The Senate Let Clinton Rewrite The C.F.E.
Treaty Without Its Advice And Consent?
(No. 96-P
86, 18 September 1996) and Hope
Over Experience: Despite Military
Fig-Leaf, Clinton’s Landmine Ban Is Still
A ‘Utopian Delusion’ (
3 April 1996).
2. In his powerful
essay in the 8 February 1997 Daily
Telegraph, former professional
mine-clearer Paul Jefferson notes that
operations other than war also may
require the use of mines for the safety
of U.S. and allied personnel: “Our
soldiers take part in peacekeeping
operations in which they could
easily find themselves outnumbered by
hostile forces, needing to buy themselves
time and protection before evacuation or
regrouping. They can achieve this with AP
mines.”
3. The ICRC spent
roughly $5 million in its recent campaign
to achieve another totally unverifiable
and ill-advised arms control initiative
— a ban on the use of military lasers
capable of blinding enemy personnel. By
some estimates, its current campaign
against APLs may involve outlays several
times that amount.
4. Jefferson’s
article also calls into question the
accuracy of oft-cited estimates about the
numbers of APLs currently in the ground
around the world. He documents how in at
least some key cases these estimates have
been politically manipulated:
“Lobbyists would have you
believe that lifting mines from
the ground will not work, that
the problem is too intractable
for mine-clearance operations to
cope with. They say that
mines are being laid on such a
scale that only an outright ban
on the weapon will forestall
terrible devastation. They
are wrong. The figures
being bandied about have been
arrived at by methods of which
the general public knows little.
These figures are then written up
in briefing sheets and passed on
to journalists who accept them
without question.” (Emphasis
added.)
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