High tech's slow march in land mine campaign

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The Defense Department's Doheny says those working with the system are getting a thorough introduction that targets 15 types of mines, including low-metallic ones, and both antipersonnel and antitank ones.

"After about 10 days of training, they're very good," he said. "If there's any question with the GPR that it might be a mine...we call it a mine. We don't want any false negatives."

Low-metal sniffer
A self-propelled GPR system that's designed to find low-metal antitank mines is the MineStalker, from a company called Niitek. The device also promises to find those that are buried deeper and are tougher to find with a metal detector. It's been tested in Angola and Namibia.

Slow and steady probing isn't the only way to deal with a known or suspected minefield. It can also be pummeled or plowed by heavy equipment. Some demining programs, including the one in Croatia, have made a big investment in armor-plated mechanical gear such as tillers and flails. This is expensive equipment, with prices ranging from $100,000 to $1.5 million.

Even the best of those devices, though, can't be guaranteed to find all the land mines, and it's 100 percent elimination that's the goal of humanitarian demining. The big machines are relatively crude tools that still require people to go in to do quality checks--and further digging.

"No one is yet happy that a machine is capable of clearing an area," Mulliner of the U.N. Mine Action Service said. "Machines are used because of a low threat in the area. Machines are never used in a primary role of clearing yet."

Meanwhile, demining teams in the field are starting to make more thorough use of GPS tools, geographical information systems and satellite imagery for scoping out areas and recording their findings.

"I used Google Earth to look at a mined area in the desert recently and could see that there were many burned-out vehicle wrecks in the area--which means that I know I will need to take machines to move those and may need to deploy extra skills to deal with the damaged ammunition that may be in them," Smith wrote.

But that just gives an overall sense of an area. It doesn't begin to pinpoint the actual mines, which brings things back to metal detectors and HSTAMIDS.

"The key to the whole thing is detection. In the demining world, if you can find it, you can deal with it," Carruthers said. "There isn't anything in the next couple years that's going to happen except multisensor (technology)."