Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 9 - Booby Traps - full transcript

You're watching the Military Channel.

Go behind the lines.

Hidden and dangerous.

J-J-Jump!

Lines, traps, and improvised explosive devices strike without warning.

Move it, Trapp!

Reeking havoc on anything crossing their path.

Whether in the hands of a trained soldier or a terrorist bent on destruction,
these weapons are designed to maim, kill, and psychologically defeat the enemy.

Invisible and indiscriminate, they are the ultimate silent assassins.

A really bad day.

Prepare to take cover as we go back through generations of technology to reveal
how traps, mines, and IEDs became the most devious weapons on the battlefield.



It's time to go ballistic.

The most sophisticated area denial weapon in the world today is the U.S. Army's
Intelligent Munition System, or IMS.

State of the art, it's the end result of centuries of landmine development.

IMS is the ultimate sentinel.

It can be deployed to protect a perimeter or form an artificial barrier.

Its spider component places its own tripwires and set to detonate when triggered
or by command.

IMS is versatile.

It can engage both infantry and armored targets.

It can also be switched on and off to give friendly ground forces tactical
flexibility when on the attack or defense.

Now, weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology to reveal how hunting techniques, explosives, and human ingenuity
evolved into the world's smartest and most destructive area denial munition, the
U.S. Army's IMS.

Building hidden traps to kill or wound targets is an idea that goes back
millennia.

Ruby traps, mines, IEDs, the ancient principles of traps have evolved into many
forms, but their aim hasn't changed in centuries.

To deny the enemy territory, reduce their combat effectiveness, and hit them
when they least expect it.

They make everything on the battlefield a potential killer.



With a small investment in time and materials, the returns in physical and
psychological damage on the enemy are huge.

You force people to adjust to the fact that they're not winning anymore.

Booby traps take something which is comforting, which is safe, like victory, and
they turn it into a place where you don't feel secure, you don't feel happy, you
don't feel like you can do your job properly.

Traps were first developed as a hunting technique.

Simple pit traps evened up the odds for our ancient ancestors when they took on
large, powerful prey.

With the dawn of civilization and organized warfare, these tried and tested
hunting techniques were ideal for use on the ancient and medieval battlefields.

These early military traps used the simplest technologies imaginable, sharpened
sticks and spikes.

Deployed in shallow holes, these wolf pits were an effective defensive weapon.

The Romans used these, the classic examples of the Battle of Alesia, where they
had the Gauls trapped, and they put two rings of fortifications around.

If the Gauls came out, they stepped into these pits, and you see this has got a
fish hook in it.

You step on this thing, it's hard to get out. You're going to have to rip your
foot apart to get this thing out.

For centuries, the simple stick would be used in a variety of combat
environments.

In the age of modern warfare, this cheap, low-tech weapon had lost none of its
bite, as U.S. troops would learn in Vietnam.

Lacking air power and artillery, traps were a cost-effective way for the
communist Vietnamese to seriously reduce the combat effectiveness of American
infantry.

One individual being injured takes out two other people at one time, but
everyone else in that squad is going to have to take their turn of carrying this
individual and his equipment.

So you've limited their combat effectiveness right off the bat.

So if you can get one or two or even three people injured in that squad, then
you've either limited or destroyed their combat effectiveness.

That unit is no longer viable.

In Vietnam, the sticks were made of bamboo and called pungi.

The different varieties or things that we use as pungi sticks, probably one of
the most effective, is a simple piece of bamboo.

As you can see, the bamboo is cut off to a point like this and shaved properly.
It's as sharp as a needle.

The ability to penetrate bodies, clothing, is just phenomenal. It's nearly as
good as steel.

The effect is absolutely devastating.

The simplest trap was the pungi pit, a hole bristling with razor-sharp bamboo
stakes.

For any American soldier unlucky enough to fall in, the experience could be
fatal.

Right here, men, we have our pungi man trap.

You can see when I lift up, you can see all those pungi stakes down at the
bottom.

This is probably one of the easiest and simplest traps to make up. It's just
simply a leg trap utilizing pungi sticks.

The top of this trap will be covered with a latticework, which is just simply
fine twigs woven together,

placed down over the top of this, and then leaves or whatever normal debris is
around the trap,

so that it looks natural, will be placed over the top of it.

Stepping into one of these means ripped muscles and torn flesh, but it gets
worse.

Adding a biological contaminant to the trap dramatically increases its
effectiveness.

One of the more effective ways this was used was after this would be shaped, is
that it would be filled with human excrement,

and that way anyone who fell on this would also have the human excrement
imparted into the wound and just start horrendous infections.

Disease-carrying pungis and spikes didn't have to remain static on the ground.
They could be built into traps with moving parts.

Downward pressure from a soldier's footstep would force the pungis, or spikes,
into the most vulnerable parts of his body.

Right here, man, we have our ankle trap.

The way this trap works is there's a flexible material between the two wings.

You place that into a hole so that the entire mechanism is below ground level,
so you can't see the spikes.

You then place a latticework over the top of it, as we described before, and an
individual comes by on the trail and steps into this.

The two wings then fold up, pushing the spikes all the way in.

Imagine what it would do to the side of your ankle.

Mechanical traps had a further advantage. Instead of being anchored on the
ground, pungis could directly attack from any angle.

The victim wouldn't see the danger coming.

This is a pivoting leg trap. You've got a stepping plate here.

This right here is the pivot, and on this end, the pungis stakes.

Be covered over with a latticework and, of course, camouflaged.

As you walk by, someone steps into the trap. Their own body weight powers the
trap, pushing it up and striking them.

The deadliest traps harness the most powerful force on the planet, gravity.

Free to use and always available, gravity generates velocity.

Pull a spiked bamboo trap high in the air, and on release, it will accelerate
toward the ground.

Velocity plus mass plus sharpened spikes equals depth from above.

This is called a spiked deadfall.

It's manually pulled up into the tree and suspended there 30, maybe even as high
as 50 feet up.

When the trip line is struck, gravity being what it is, it falls very quickly,
and anything underneath it will be crushed as well as being stabbed.

I'm going to take this t-shirt that we poked just a couple of holes in and place
it underneath this spiked deadfall and then drop the device on top of it.

A really bad day.

From prehistory to Vietnam, simple traps have proved their deadly effectiveness.

Combined with explosives, they would evolve further and their ability to kill,
maim and destroy would go off the scale.

Despite their deadliness, individual stick, pit and spike traps have a limited
range and rely on the enemy to get up close and personal to fall for the trick.

To evolve to the next level, traps would need to increase their range and
killing power.

Gunpowder would push the development of traps forward and give them an explosive
punch.

If you're going to have a little booby trap that's going to cause a sharp device
to nick somebody and cause them disease, that's bad enough.

What gunpowder enables you to do is use energy stored in chemical form to make
any device you make so much more effective.

The addition of explosives would give birth to a new type of trap that would
evolve into one of the most feared weapons of war, the landmine.

Concealed under the ground, these hidden killers give the force that deploys
them a huge tactical advantage.

Used en masse, they form artificial barriers and restrict enemy movement, giving
friendly forces control of the battlefield.

The best way you can use any of your landmines is to make the enemy go where you
want him to go.

You want the enemy to go right in front of your anti-tank rockets or right in
front of your machine gun.

So you take all of the other ways the enemy might want to go and you put mines
there.

You put up some tape, you hang a sign that says, look out, there are mines.

What's the enemy going to do?

Either stop, bring up some sappers to look for the mines and remove the mines
and then carry on in some slow, pathetic fashion while you cut them to pieces,

or the enemy is going to go where there are no mines, just where you want them
to go.

The first landmines were developed by Chinese engineers in the 13th century.

Made from clay pots packed with gunpowder and sharp metal, they were deployed
against invading Mongol hordes.

Primitive landmines were used in medieval Europe.

But it wasn't until the Civil War that landmines and landmine tactics came of
age.

At Yorktown in 1862, Brigadier General Rains needed a way of covering the
Confederate retreat.

He improvised landmines by burying exploding artillery shells just beneath the
surface.

Pursuing Union cavalry and infantry stepped on the shells' percussion fuses and
were blown sky high.

The horror caused by these explosions made the Union troops run away.

Due to the success of this tactic, the Confederates hugely expanded their use of
landmines.

By 1864, they were deploying them in patterned minefields to bolster the
defenses of their major cities.

The Confederate operational concept for using mines evolved as the war went on.

It was fairly random at Yorktown in 1862.

Later, north of Bermuda Hundred, the Confederacy began to employ the mines in a
tactical pattern.

The technological and tactical principles pioneered by Rains were used
extensively in the wars of the late 19th century and in World War I.

But mines were still a long way from being a primary component of the world's
arsenals.

In World War II, this would change.

A swift mobile war in which denying enemy movement was crucial.

The mine would come into its own.

During the 1930s, German engineers developed the classic self-contained anti-
personnel mine.

Called the Schrappler mine, or S-mine, it was a deadly adversary and became one
of the definitive weapons of World War II.

You notice it has these three prongs.

So what you did was you buried this in so that only those three prongs stick
above the ground.

And if they're disturbed in any way, this thing will go off.

And what happens is, this thing is propelled upward.

So this bounds up about waist level.

And then it explodes.

And these ball bearings that are all the way around, come flying out and act as
the casually producing vehicle.

And it's very, very nasty indeed.

When the French first encountered them in 1939, they didn't know what had hit
them.

They dubbed this new Nazi secret weapon the Silent Soldier.

Throughout World War II, S-mines put both fear and respect into the Allied
soldiers who encountered them.

Deadly efficient.

The design was widely copied.

And some of today's most effective mines are updated versions of the S-mine.

If you get hit by something like the Valmyra series of mines, in this particular
case it has a casing of shrapnel shaped like you see here.

This has sharp edges and stuff.

So as this comes and hits the body, it doesn't just come in and pass through and
through.

It rams, it tears, it grabs parts of the inner body and pulls it along.

So now you have the problem of a ripping, tearing shock and infection.

Land mines are not only effective against infantry.

Anti-tank mines are the lurking nightmare of every vehicle and tank driver.

Like anti-personnel mines, the first effective mass-produced anti-tank mines
were developed by German engineers in the 1920s.

Anticipating a fast tank-led war, they devised a hidden surprise for enemy
vehicles and armor.

Tanks are heavier and tougher than the infantrymen.

To disable them, anti-tank mines need to make a bigger bang.

The result was the Teller mine.

Packing 12 pounds of TNT, it could blow the track off a tank or turn a soft-
skinned vehicle into toast.

200 pounds of pressure needed to be applied to the mine to set it off.

This meant that the mine could tell the difference between an infantryman and a
tank, only detonating when a heavy machine passed over it.

Here it is.

It's got a very nice little handle so you can pick it up, but it takes about 200
pounds of pressure on this to set it off.

In the battles that raged across the North African deserts in World War II,
anti-tank mines were the key to victory.

At the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, the Germans created Devil's Gardens.

Minefields five miles deep, sewn with hundreds of thousands of anti-tank and
anti-personnel mines.

Designed to reduce the Allies' advantage in tanks, they were a considerable
barrier.

The Devil's Gardens were very effective because of the large number of mines and
the depth, which was several kilometers, but you never were sure where the mines
were.

Through the insane bravery and skill of Royal Engineer Sappers, the gardens were
eventually breached and the Axis forces defeated.

But the specter of the North Africa campaign continues to haunt the desert.

Over one million World War II mines still lay beneath the sands.

In contrast, pound for pound, today's anti-tank mines are more powerful than
their World War II predecessors.

For a tank, encountering one of these on the battlefield means certain
destruction.

If you have situations like this, which happens sometimes, where they will
actually stack mines, if a tank, let's say, rolls over that, that's over 45
pounds of explosives.

That amount of explosives is going to pick a 70-ton tank up and throw it across
the room.

For the first half of the 20th century, mines had a major drawback.

Their metal content made them easily detectable.

Today's most effective mines have very few metal components, instead using high-
density plastics, making them almost invisible to detection.

The metal content of this, the PMA-2 series, quite literally is not much more
than the piece of my watch here.

So when you add garbage or fragments from a former combat area, this gets very
difficult to discern among the rest of the garbage, easily missed.

Throughout the 20th century, mines have put dread into the enemy and maimed and
killed millions of people who've stepped on them.

But without the device to trigger them, mines and other traps are useless.

From the primitive to the state-of-the-art, traps have evolved the most
ingenious triggers to catch the enemy unaware and take them out of action.

When the circuit was completed, boom.

On the battlefield, hidden danger lurks everywhere.

Traps, mines, and IEDs secretly lay in wait for unsuspecting victims to set them
off.

All rely on a chain reaction to release their destructive potential.

To detect the enemy and set the chain in motion, you first need a trigger.

The trigger is what turns potential destruction into real destruction, in order
to turn some poor guy who's doing a little battlefield tourism into 150 pounds
of uncooked hamburger out there on the battlefield.

The simplest way to trigger a device is through direct observation.

Watch your enemy, wait for them to get within range, and then command-detonate
the trap.

The earliest form of command-detonating traps was the powder train, a line of
gunpowder linking the charge to a human holding a match.

They were highly problematic.

Depending on its composition, powder burnt at different speeds, and the smoke it
gave off could alert an enemy to the trap's location.

A more discreet and reliable method was needed.

In the early 19th century, William Bickford, an English mining engineer, solved
the problem.

The fuses of Bickford's day were unreliable.

The time it took for a certain length of fuse to burn could not be accurately
estimated.

Following a number of mining disasters caused by unreliable fuses, Bickford was
determined to save miners' lives and create a better type of fuse.

He invented the safety fuse.

Made from a core of gunpowder and twisted flax, bound with twine, and covered in
tar, it burnt at a constant 30 seconds per foot.

He came up with a constant burning fuse.

So if you cut the fuse this long, you knew exactly how long it went off. Hence,
a safety fuse.

But safety fuse still needed a human to light one end and stand well back.

For a command-detonated trap, a faster method of detonating explosives needed to
be found.

Evolving in parallel with fuses in the 19th century, electric current would make
command detonation instantaneous.

Used extensively in both world wars, electrical detonation could even be used in
the jungles of Vietnam.

Many of the booby traps were actually initiated with electricity.

Many of the flashlight batteries sometimes, the GIs, the diggers, would toss out
when they became dim, still could be used to set off booby traps.

Now here on this piece of bamboo, you see how it's been split with a space in
between.

What happens is, these two pieces of copper with wire hooked up to them with a
battery would make contact and the battery would go through, and when the
circuit was completed, boom.

Boom.

A standard method for initiating traps in the 20th century, this simple
principle is used with deadly effect today by insurgents and terrorists on the
streets of Iraq.

In war, manpower is in short supply.

Often traps need to work automatically when triggered by the victim, not
initiated by an observer.

For automatic traps to be effective, the trigger needs to be discreet and
undetectable, so the victim is completely unaware they're just about to spring
the trap.

Our ancient ancestors used tripwires as simple triggers for traps.

Strung between an anchor and the trap itself, with a device to hold it in place,
the principle was simple.

Anything, man or beast, tripping the wire would set off the trap.

Combined with an A-trip device, an ingenious mechanism made from natural
materials to secure the trap, it was simple but effective.

It consists of three pieces of wood that you simply pick up anywhere off of the
ground.

This is one of the holding logs, another holding line, and this here is the
sear.

It's the tension of the sear pulling against the trip device that locks it into
place.

The trip line coming off of the long leg of the A simply pulls this device
slightly askew, releasing one side of the sear.

When that happens, the power is released, the sear is thrust forward.

As relevant today as in prehistory, tripwires have evolved from natural
materials into metals and man-made fibers that are very strong and hard to
detect.

These are United States Army booby trap wire reels, for example.

You notice there are two of them here that are a yellowish color and two green.

What this does, it takes care of any background that you might run into.

If you've got leaves, you might, as your background like we have here, you might
choose the yellow for in desert sand.

And of course green would be good in most any forested areas as well.

In the 20th century, military designers built new trap triggers.

Mechanical, electronic and chemical sensors that act on changes in time, motion,
light and vibration have all been used widely in the century's major conflicts
to trigger traps.

In Vietnam, Dr. William Atwater used magnetic sensors to detect enemy patrols.

Creating a magnetic field between two poles across a path, any enemy soldiers
carrying metal passing between the poles would disrupt the field and set off an
alarm in his fire base.

Atwater's Marines would then have an advance warning of their approach and could
trigger a surprise.

We had a draw that led up to a 50 caliber bunker.

That was a natural avenue of approach.

So what we did was we took two magnetic poles and you put them in the ground and
they created a magnetic field in between the two poles.

Then up from that, we had a 55 gallon drum of napalm with two pounds of C4
explosive under it wired to a hell box.

Well one night about six folks walked up that draw, set the alarm off in between
that magnetic detector and about three seconds later the hell box got cranked.

And they were turned into crispy critters.

Tripwires and sensors detect the enemy's movement, but this is just the first
step.

For an explosive trap to do its job, that movement needs to trigger an instant
detonation.

This is achieved by using a firing device incorporating a percussion cap.

Patented in 1807 by a Scottish minister, Reverend Forsyth, the percussion cap
produces an instantaneous spark when struck with a firing pin.

Built into a firing device, the percussion cap spark has enough power to start a
fuse burning or detonate an explosive.

In World War II, purpose-built firing devices combining percussion caps, fuses
and switches were manufactured and used en masse for the first time.

All sides made firing devices that were cheap and reliable for sabotage,
demolition and devious traps.

This is a percussion cap fuse and if you step on this in any way shape or form,
it drives this firing pin down.

The firing cap explodes causing the high explosive then to detonate.

Another device is just a pressure device and in this particular case this is a
mine fuse, so 200 pounds of pressure on this will set this off.

Today, a variety of triggers, firing devices and explosive charges can be
combined into a single all-in-one device like the U.S. Army SLAM.

It's a selectable, lightweight attack munition and there's lots of ways you can
set this thing off and it's a shape charge.

It's got a timer on it, you can command detonate it, rig it with a tripwire, you
can lay it into the ground like this so it blows up through the belly of a tank.

You can set it off-road so the jet is swarmed and goes across the road.

You can set it for delay and the also good thing about this is you can turn it
on and turn it off.

An evolution of triggers and firing devices combined with the increasing
prosperity of warfare in the 20th century would give birth to the most feared
and psychologically damaging weapons on the battlefield.

The booby trap.

Bang, you get your hand blown off.

On the battlefield, there is one trap so cunning that it strikes fear into the
heart of every infantryman.

They have been used in every major conflict in the past 100 years and a weapon
of choice for guerrilla fighters.

They're called booby traps.

A booby trap is meant to turn the safe into the unsafe.

Even in victory, you've got a tremendous psychological advantage and you touch a
piece of captured enemy armor, bang, you get your hand blown off.

Booby traps get their name from a docile marine bird called a booby that was so
dim-witted it just walked into sailors' traps.

But there's nothing dumb about a booby trap.

They are the ultimate psychological weapon specifically designed to maim and
kill when the soldier thinks he's safe.

You don't know whether or not the weapon in the corner has been booby trapped.

You pick it up, it blows up and it plays with your mind and that's why it's
dumb.

It's to cause fear and uncertainty with the enemy.

Booby traps are improvised weapons made from the materials the soldier has to
hand.

Mines, grenades, demolition charges, artillery shells.

A booby trap can utilize virtually any munition to provide an explosive punch.

Key to a booby trap is a lure.

Unlike minefields sewn in numbers, booby traps are one-offs hiding in the most
familiar and ordinary situations.

A place like this could be absolutely safe or it could be deadly.

They lull a soldier into a false sense of security.

They turn his curiosity into his enemy.

Anything that looks enticing can be opened, closed or picked up can be made into
a death trap.

Anything can be booby trapped. A door can be booby trapped, a chair can be booby
trapped.

You name it, you're only limited by your imagination as to what can be booby
trapped.

And it's the human imagination combined with explosives and a trigger that is
crucial to a booby trap's effectiveness.

The more devious the mind, the more unexpected the trap and the more successful
it will be.

You've got to have a level of fiendish imagination to think up ever newer, ever
more subtle, ever more twisted ways of turning that potential destruction into
real destruction.

Due to deficiencies in early explosives and firing devices, it wasn't until the
20th century that effective widespread booby trapping became viable.

Frequently the cheapest and simplest devices are used.

Booby traps are the ultimate nuisance weapon, perfect for an army on the back
foot or a force that has a military disadvantage.

Simple, cheap and fatal.

The side that uses booby traps is normally the folks that are on the defensive,
you're trying to slow folks down.

It's also the weaker side. It's a weapon of the weak, not a weapon of the
strong.

Whilst retreating through Europe during World War I and World War II, the
Germans defined modern booby trapping techniques.

Combining munitions with firing devices and tripwires that work through simple
physical principles such as pulling, application of pressure and release of
pressure, they established the basic tenets of dirty warfare.

One of the most common booby traps encountered by Allied troops in World War II
used a pull firing device, munition and a tripwire.

This is M2 frag, fitted with a pull switch.

Now what I'm going to do is fix a piece of fishing line to the split ring here
so that when the door opens it will pull the firing pin and it would have, if
this was a live M2 frag, it would detonate the M2 frag.

What you do is you would attach your fishing line to some point on the door
there, anchor the grenade down here so that you've got it ready to be tugged
open.

Now what's going to happen is a guy is going to come through the door, he's
going to open it.

The guy pulls it, that goes, he's through the door and this is exploding.

You are well within the lethal range when that happens.

Combined with a devious imagination, the simple pull technique could be applied
to virtually any object, as the British found to their cost in Northwest Europe
in World War II.

The Germans would put a picture askew thinking that Joe Squatty, when he came
into the room, could care less, but officers being gentlemen would see the thing
and there's something in the human mind about wanting to straighten the picture.

So an officer would come and straighten the picture and blow himself up.

With the development of pull pin frag grenades, another booby trapping technique
became widespread, pressure release.

In Vietnam, the pressure release booby trap was a constant threat.

Live grenades could be placed in or under virtually anything.

The communist Vietnamese forces used this technique to great effect using
discarded American weapons.

An example would be the law tube, light anti-tank weapon.

After it was fired for the first couple of years, the soldiers would just toss
the empty fiberglass tube away.

The problem with that is they gave their enemy a weapon.

Hand grenades could be placed inside of this one at a time.

The pin would be pulled and you see the tube would keep the safety spoon from
flying off of it.

It would be lined up inside and then raised up among the trees up above a trail
so that on command detonation,

which means someone pulls the cord on it, or from a trip wire, it would release
the open end.

And as it swung down across the trail, some tropical force would drop the hand
grenades out over the trail.

Discarded weapons were just the beginning.

Any contained space that could hold the spoon onto the grenade could be made
into a booby trap.

Even the human skull.

What they would do is split a person along the hairline, pull the scalp back and
the crush under the skull.

And then they'd put the grenade underneath the hair and pull it back.

And then when the medics would come to pick up the body of the grenade, it would
fall out and cause more casualties.

It's pretty gory.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, mines and booby traps have proved their
effectiveness time and again.

But their next evolution will depend on the countermeasures employed to
neutralize them.

For over a century, there's been an arms race between trap development and the
men and machines whose job it is to seek and destroy them.

As I was calling them back on the radio to tell them to stay put, the vehicle
detonated.

Oh my God.

For tanks and infantry, battlefield traps mean death.

They pose such a threat that generations of countermeasures have been developed
to seek and safely dispose of them.

The first countermeasures for mines were very primitive, using just a soldier's
basic equipment.

To find mines in World War I and World War II, soldiers had to lie on the ground
and prod the earth with bayonets or knives.

If metal touched metal, they knew a deadly mine lay just inches beneath the
surface.

You're not going to find the mine unless you get on your knees and probe the
dirt.

The average soldier that had to pick their way through a minefield or a possible
threat area had little more than this bayonet and its pouch.

A long, tedious, dangerous process, but again, the bayonet lent itself to that
because that's primarily what the soldier had.

To deal with the huge increase in mine manufacture and deployment after 1945,
specialized mine probes were devised.

Today, the probe is still the best tool for accurately finding a mine's
position.

If we do detect a mine, a piece of ordnance in the ground, we still have to have
the man come in and actually locate it, identify it as an anti-personnel, as an
anti-vehicular, which dictates the size of the charge.

And to do that, he's got to use the probe. These range anywhere from $25 a piece
to $700 a piece, smart probes that detect the type of metal it's going up
against.

Minefields can cover hundreds of square miles, and detection needs to be quick
and safe.

Pioneered in the 1930s, modern metal detectors can pick up the metal content of
a mine.

Consisting of a metal-sensitive magnetic coil attached to a pole, the operator
can sweep much faster than just probing the ground.

When a sweep passes over a metal object, the detector emits an audible sound,
alerting the operator.

Today's metal detectors are highly sensitive and able to find very small amounts
of metal, greatly aiding the detection of hidden mines.

What you have here is the H-STAMIDS. It incorporates a ground-penetrating radar
with an enhanced metal detection capability.

The ground-penetrating radar detects the mass in the ground. It gives you a
specific signal that says you've got a mass, a rock, a piece of wood, whatever
the case may be.

A separate enhanced metal detection capability gives you yet another signal. So
if you have very minute pieces of metal, it's going to give you a separate
signal.

When you have the two combined together, a metal presence inside of a mass, it's
going to give you yet a third signal, an indicator.

The trap that poses the greatest threat on today's battlefield is the improvised
explosive device, or IED.

The clue is in the name, improvised. IEDs can be made from any munition or
homemade explosive and disguised as virtually anything.

What we have down here is a large piece of ordnance encased in cement.

The significance of this is in some of these developing countries, unlike in the
United States, where we have continuous curbing, they have sections.

And if you've got an area that had torn up curbing one day, yet it's all
repaired the next day, there's an indicator, right?

But this is a pretty significant piece of ordnance. This would certainly impact
a convoy coming nearby within five to ten meters.

They can be fired by command detonation or any electrical device that can send
and receive a radio or microwave signal.

You can take something that you get readily from any kind of store anywhere
around the world and rig it to send that electrical impulse to the system.

Quite literally, you don't have to be standing here. You can be hiding behind a
protective works wall as a convoy drives by, and that kid's toy sends a signal
which initiates this large piece of ordnance.

From the kid's toys to garage door openers that you see here, again, same
principle, signal sent, it's received, initiates the device, which destroys the
vehicles and personnel in the open.

To effectively counter the IED threat, U.S. Army engineers needed to change tack
and think big.

Their solution is the Buffalo, a heavily armored truck with a robotic arm
attached.

Buffalo backing up. See that under that carport? Oh yeah, let's check that thing
out.

Buffalo patrols in Iraq clear traffic routes of IEDs to ensure the safety of
U.S. troops.

Buffalo mine protected vehicle holds a pretty hefty crew. It has a good
observation platform because it sits high.

It gives us a way without having to get out of a vehicle and sift through
garbage.

It gives us a way to clear an area and find out if we have a hidden bomb or if
we just have a large pile of trash, which is fairly common on the streets of
Iraq.

Captain Baucht leads Buffalo patrols in Baghdad. On his very first mission, he
encountered a suspicious vehicle and decided to investigate.

It was nighttime. There was no reason to have this vehicle on the side of the
road. It was suspicious.

We secured the area and I sent my Buffalo vehicle forward to see if it could see
anything inside the vehicle to either confirm or deny that this contained
explosives.

And the Buffalo moved to 20 meters away from this potential vehicle explosive
device and it couldn't see inside. It couldn't confirm or deny.

And as I was calling them back on the radio to tell them to stay put, the
vehicle detonated.

Oh my God.

It was a significant amount of explosives. The fireball was three to four
stories high and smoke and debris and fire completely engulfed back through my
Buffalo vehicle.

I'm deaf. I get flash blindness. I get on the radio. I call them for status
reports, hoping someone inside of that vehicle can get to a radio and tell me
their status.

I wasn't thinking, do I have casualties in my Buffalo? I was thinking, how many
casualties do I have in my Buffalo?

Fifteen seconds go by. I put the call in again. Status report. Status report.

Feels like an eternity when I finally get the silence of the airwaves broken by
my Buffalo vehicle commander who says, sir, everyone in the vehicle is OK and we
have minimal damage.

The Buffalo completely resisted it and proceeded to go on about its mission.

I would come to find out it was by far the largest explosion we ever experienced
in that country.

We had IEDs detonated on us a number of times. We never once had a piece of
shrapnel enter our vehicles.

You would get superficial damage to windows, but the vehicles themselves kept
the soldiers inside safe and secure.

Traps, mines and IEDs are indiscriminate. They make no distinction between
soldiers and noncombatants.

When the war has ended, they inflict horrific casualties on civilians trying to
rebuild their lives.

They're not trained. They're not aware. They're in a survivor mode.

There is no working or functioning economy which places them at the most risk of
these explosive remnants of war.

Many of these explosive remnants, anti-personnel mines and booby traps are now
illegal.

In their place, a new generation of smarter traps have been designed that can
tell the difference between friend and foe, soldier and civilian.

The smartest is the intelligent munition system, the perfect synthesis of
hundreds of years of technological development.

It can detect and engage the enemy infantry and armor using air form munitions.

Once the conflict is over, it can be switched off and taken home.

Today's traps are truly the sum of their parts.

Drawn together, the branches on their family tree reflect their unique genesis.

Hunting techniques gave birth to battlefield traps. Chemical explosives spawned
anti-personnel and anti-tank mines.

Firing devices and sensors evolved traps into the world's most effective
sentinel.

The intelligent munition system. Weaponologically, it's top of the tree.