Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label cost of war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cost of war. Show all posts

Monday, October 16, 2023

Leftovers


In France, 30 or 40 tons of unexploded ordnance are recovered every year - mostly WWI era.

At that rate, it's estimated that it'll take another 300 years to clear it all.

There's a 42,000-acre area near Verdun that the French government has designated Zone Rouge (Red Zone) where it's still too dangerous for people to go. In the 300 days of the Battle Of Verdun, millions of artillery rounds were fired, with about 25% of them didn't go off.

They're also still finding bombs and grenades and artillery shells from WWII.

Dozens of people are killed and injured every year - casualties of two world wars that were "over" 80-100 years ago.

The war in Ukraine is now in it's 2nd year, and it's already estimated that it could take 100 years to "de-mine" the place.


Ukraine is now the most mined country. It will take decades to make safe.

In a year and a half of conflict, land mines — along with unexploded bombs, artillery shells and other deadly byproducts of war — have contaminated a swath of Ukraine roughly the size of Florida or Uruguay. It has become the world’s most mined country.

The transformation of Ukraine’s heartland into patches of wasteland riddled with danger is a long-term calamity on a scale that ordnance experts say has rarely been seen, and that could take hundreds of years and billions of dollars to undo.

Efforts to clear the hazards, known as unexploded ordnance, along with those to measure the full extent of the problem, can only proceed so far given that the conflict is still underway. But data collected by Ukraine’s government and independent humanitarian mine clearance groups tells a stark story.

“The sheer quantity of ordnance in Ukraine is just unprecedented in the last 30 years. There’s nothing like it,” said Greg Crowther, the director of programs for the Mines Advisory Group, a British charity that works to clear mines and unexploded ordnance internationally.




Staggering scale

About 30 percent of Ukraine, more than 67,000 square miles, has been exposed to severe conflict and will require time-consuming, expensive and dangerous clearance operations, according to a recent report by GLOBSEC, a think tank based in Slovakia.

Though the ongoing combat renders precise surveys impossible, the scale and concentration of ordnance makes Ukraine’s contamination greater than that of other heavily mined countries such as Afghanistan and Syria.

HALO Trust, an international nonprofit that clears land mines, has tracked, using open-source information, more than 2,300 incidents in Ukraine in which ordnance requiring clearance was discovered. Though events are greatly underreported and the data does not include the results of on-the-ground surveys by HALO Trust or other organizations, it gives a harrowing outline of the problem.

This week’s deployment by Ukrainian forces of U.S.-made cluster munitions, which are known to scatter duds that fail to explode, can only add to the danger.

Human cost


The explosives have already taken a heavy toll. Between the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and July 2023, the United Nations has recorded 298 civilian deaths from explosive remnants of war, 22 of them children, and 632 civilian injuries.



Civilian deminers, who clear unexploded ordnance and mines from liberated territories, are highly trained and use safety gear. But they are not immune from catastrophic accidents.

Vladislav Sokolov, a deminer for Ukraine’s emergency service, told The Washington Post that one of his friends, a fellow deminer, lost a leg while working in a Kramatorsk minefield in 2022. Sokolov and his friend reunited at a meeting of ordnance disposal professionals after he received a prosthetic.

He was “trying to learn to walk” again, Sokolov said.

Dmytro Mialkovskyi, a Ukrainian military surgeon, has been operating on mine injuries since the beginning of the war. On Friday, at a hospital in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, he had to make a gut-wrenching call to save the life of a mine blast patient who was dying of his injuries.

“I realized that this leg is killing him and there is another leg with a tourniquet, too,” Mialkovskyi said. “So I had to do a quick amputation of both legs. In 10 minutes.”

“I still don’t know if he’ll survive,” he said.

Hidden killers

Both sides use mines. Russia heavily mined its front lines in anticipation of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive, and has made far more extensive use of widely banned antipersonnel mines.

Small, deadly antipersonnel mines, triggered by the weight of the human body, cannot discriminate between combatants and noncombatants.

Russian forces have used at least 13 types of antipersonnel mines, as well as victim-activated booby traps, Human Rights Watch investigations found. Evidence suggests Ukraine has also used at least one type of antipersonnel mine, a rocket-delivered PFM blast mine, around the Ukrainian city of Izyum in summer 2022.

Antitank mines, which usually require immense weight to detonate, are not internationally banned, though any explosive device that could be detonated unintentionally by a civilian can be considered an antipersonnel mine under the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, to which Ukraine, but not Russia or the United States, is a party.

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces have used anti-vehicle mines.

The United States included two types of mines in its aid packages to Ukraine: the Remote Anti-Armor Mine System, which uses 155-milimeter artillery rounds to create temporary minefields programmed to self-destruct, and M21 antitank mines, which require hundreds of pounds of force to detonate but do not self-destruct, leading to concerns about later removal.

Mines are not the only type of explosive that pose a threat. Mortars, bombs, artillery shells, cluster munitions and others also become hazards if they do not explode when deployed.

Undoing the damage

Russia’s heavily mined defenses, built up over months of stalemate along the front lines, are slowing down the Ukrainian counteroffensive that began last month, damaging Western-supplied battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

Though specialized mine-clearing vehicles are in use, front-line mines are so concentrated that specialized soldiers, called sappers, have had to resort to clearing paths by hand.

Humanitarian clearance operations, which return denied land to local populations after conflict, are extremely slow, tedious and expensive. They are underway across parts of Ukraine, including around Kyiv, the capital, and other areas West of the front lines, where the battle has receded.

Ukraine’s contaminated territory is so massive that some experts estimate humanitarian clearance would take the approximately 500 demining teams in current operation 757 years to complete.

Demining teams crawl inch by inch across the terrain, using metal detectors and sometimes explosive-sniffing dogs, excavating every signal, not knowing whether they will uncover a harmless nail or deadly mine.

GLOBSEC estimates that one deminer can only clear 49 to 82 square feet per day, depending on the terrain and concentration of explosives.

The short window for clearance in the spring, after the ground thaws and before farmers plant, leaves little room for disasters like the Kakhovka dam breach in early June, which drastically disrupted clearance efforts.

Farmers in heavily contaminated regions such as Kherson have resorted to visual inspections and rigging tractors with armored plates while planting this year’s harvest.

There is a steady market for “dark deminers,” who offer hasty and often unreliable clearance without official certification, to clear some of the more than 19,000 square miles of unusable agricultural land.

Demining is not just slow, it’s also expensive. The World Bank estimates that demining Ukraine, which costs between $2 and $8 per square meter, will cost $37.4 billion over the next 10 years.


The United States has committed more than $95 million to Ukraine’s demining, according to a 2023 State Department report.

How Ukraine compares

Mines as a dark legacy of conflict all over the world, from Cambodia to Kosovo, hint at the challenges Ukraine could face as it rebuilds.

Cambodia, riddled with millions of land mines after decades of conflict, has been subject to ongoing clearance operations for 30 years. Crowther estimates there at least five years of work remains. Tens of thousands of people have been maimed by Cambodia’s mines.

Kosovo saw armed conflict in 1998 and 1999. “Kosovo was a six-month war that was a fraction of the scale of this conflict,” Crowther said of the war in Ukraine. “It’s taken decades.”

And don't start thinking anybody's immune to this shit.

(about 5 miles from my house)


Green Mountain will undergo full sweep for historic military munitions in 2024 after years of small searches

Signs near some of the trailheads warn visitors that "pieces of spent artillery shells from prior to World War II have been found in the park," including potentially "unexploded pieces of artillery."

LAKEWOOD, Colo. — More than a decade after historic military munitions were first found on Lakewood's Green Mountain, a comprehensive, in-depth sweep for any remaining items is planned for the spring of 2024.

Initial assessments have already been done to remove munitions, but a more thorough evaluation is planned for sometime in the spring of 2024, according to Lt. Col. Brian Hunsaker, branch chief for cleanup and restoration at the National Guard Bureau in Arlington in Virginia.

- more -

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Let's Try Something Else

Retribution and punishment.  That's what is seems we're all about now.
Mom Danielle Wolf was grocery shopping at a Kroger store in North Augusta, South Carolina when she was arrested for disorderly conduct after cursing in the presence of her two daughters, WJBF News Channel 6 reports.
--and--
Ms. Richardson, 28, was arrested after an officer saw the kids playing in the park with no adult supervision, parked her patrol car, and saw the kids waving her over. What then, Bay News 9?
Maybe the cops involved in those incidents could've just done a little mediating and defusing and admonishing; or maybe they could've concentrated a little more on the whole "To Serve" part of the customary motto that's supposed to be kind of a guiding principle for Law Enforcement.

But peace-making isn't what's cool now.  It isn't sexy like blowin' shit up.  When you've trained an entire generation to be soldiers (a shitload of rookie cops are coming straight outa the US Military these days), and you've reduced everything to the binary - "you're either with us or you're against us" - when it's always and only either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white - what you end up with is the mindset that wearing the uniform makes you the hero, and that means everybody else is the bad guy.

So the default position is Shoot-First-And-Fuck-You-And-Your-Questions, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anybody who wants to do the real work involved in keeping the shit from hitting fan in the first place, which is what makes it way too extraordinary when real cops like Ron Johnson come along who understand what the job is supposed to be all about, with the first tenet being that a fellow American is not the fucking enemy.


Prevention is always more cost-effective than remedy.  It costs us a lot less to provide food, clothing, housing and a decent education for a kid in the first 18 years of his life than it does to hunt him down, arrest him, put him on trial and to keep him in jail for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years.  And the costs of grinding him up in the "Justice System" are only the direct costs; the ones we can easily see and identify.  There are plenty of other costs associated with whatever his "crimes" happened to be that we usually don't even acknowledge - the Opportunity Costs of lost productivity, insurance, emergency response, recovery and rehab and on and on and on.

What's been going on in Ferguson is a really great example of all those hidden costs kinda poppin' up all at once.

And the question is: why do the people of Ferguson have to pay that price for us, instead of Wall Street and General Dynamics and Corrections Corp of America?

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Today's Quote

God love Charlie Pierce, especially for having sense enough to love Little Jemmy Madison:
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.  -- James Madison, Political Observations, April 20, 1795.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Kaboom

Speaking of shit - which I kinda do in the next post down from this one - I've had this one in mind for a good long while.

This is a screen shot from Google Maps of an area to the northwest of Las Vegas and to the southwest of Papoose Lake in Nevada:


Every little round-ish feature (they look like barnacles to me) on the above pic is where the US detonated a nuclear bomb of some kind, to test it out; to make sure it worked as advertised.

And this is just Nevada.

Face It

This clip is embedded so it fast forwards to where the really bad shit starts (at about 28:30). Kinda like the really bad shit doesn't actually start til after the war is "over".

And don't you dare look away.  This is what we did.  This is on us.



Gosh - it seems Iraq is all fucked up.  Just like some of us said it would be.

And some of the people we turned into the tools we used to fuck up Iraq are all fucked up too.



But we just walk away.