When is a landmine not a landmine? This is the question facing officials at the Pentagon who are due to decide whether to start producing a new generation of what the army calls “intelligent munitions” at the start of December.
While traditional landmines maim and kill indiscriminately, these weapons have to be monitored and activated remotely by a soldier watching events on a laptop. “If there’s a school bus, the bus drives on, but if it’s an armoured personnel carrier it will be destroyed,” a US military spokesman says.
The mines will be designed to self-destruct without injuring anyone after…
