Mine Warfare Models Figure 1: Mining Options Depend on Water Depth. 3. Campaign/theater Level Models

A mine is basically a weapon that can't move and can only attack a target by blowing itself up, a rather primitive approach to warfare. Being required neither to move nor to project power at a distance, mines are relatively cheap; a mine may cost thousands of dollars while a missile or torpedo of equivalent destructive power would cost hundreds of thousands. Being cheap and available on the international arms market, mines can be employed in significant quantity by any country with even a modest military budget. They can be very effective. In 1950 during the Korean War, the minefield in Wonsan harbor inspired RADM Alan Smith to say (Milia, 1991): The US Navy has lost control of the sea to a nation without a Navy, using pre-World War I weapons laid by vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.. That minefield delayed the planned landing at Wonsan by over a week while 250 ships steamed back and forth outside the harbor. The United States Navy lost four minesweepers in the process of clearing it, and several other ships were also sunk or damaged (Hartmann (1979)). About Iraq's use of mines in the Gulf War, ADM Arthur (COMUSNAVCENT) said (Mardola and Schneller, 1998): Iraq successfully delayed and might have prevented an amphibious assault on Kuwait's assailable flank, protected a large part of its force from the effects of naval gunfire, and severely hampered surface operations in the northern Arabian Gulf, all through the use of naval mines. Even when the location and nature of the Iraqi minefields was revealed after the war, it took several months for the allied nations to clear them. The first effective use of mines was by the Confederacy in the US Civil War — the " torpedoes " that Adm. Farragut damned at Mobile Bay. Adm. Farragut also stated that mines were not a weapon that a chivalrous nation would employ. General Sherman was even more direct in expressing the feeling of the time that mines were simply not an acceptable weapon of war (If torpedoes are found in the possession of an enemy to our rear, you may cause them to be put on the ground and tested by wagon-loads of prisoners, or, if need be, by citizens implicated in their use. 3 The use of mines no longer provokes that kind of response, and is by now an …