With the United States joining negotiations for an international ban of anti-personnel landmines at an Oslo conference, the Pentagon, which has long argued that landmines are a crucial part of the war-fighting machine, is standing on shaky ground.
Consider the evidence: First, President Clinton did an about-face and announced on 18 August that the United States would join 100 nations in the Canadian-led campaign to phase out the use of landmines. Then, two days later, Demiltarization for Democracy, a nonprofit organization aimed at reducing the Cold War military build-up, issued a damning report saying that computerized Pentagon war games paint a false picture of the need for landmines in Korea - the one place the administration insists on exempting from the global ban now under negotiation.
"The Pentagon war games are based on extremely faulty logic," says Scott Nathanson, a senior researcher on Demilitarization for Democracy's report, Exploding the Landmine Myth in Korea. "For instance, they assume that the North Koreans will be able to advance through the mountainous demilitarized zone at roughly the same rate the US Army made its way through the Iraqi desert in the Gulf War. That's ridiculous."
Despite year-old lip service to the ideal of banning anti-personnel landmines, the Oslo conference represents the first time the US has fully participated in global negotiations to ban mines. Clinton's decision to participate is a positive sign, but still, critics say, he is crafting the nation's landmine policy on bad war game information from hawks at the Pentagon.
Critics are especially leery of his Korea policy, which would exempt efforts to plant the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea with so-called dumb landmines. An estimated 100 million dumb mines - the kind that stay live for years - litter old battlefields in 68 countries. They explode at a touch, killing or maiming an estimated 26,000 people a year.
Although the United States stopped exporting dumb mines in 1992, it still plants them strategically along the border between North and South Korea. And if you buy the Pentagon's rationale - that the removal of such mines would, in the 1996 words of Defense Secretary William Perry, "entail the loss of tens of thousands of soldiers and perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians" - maybe they should.
But Demilitarization for Democracy says such rationale is specious - based entirely on a series of assumptions which greatly exaggerate North Korea's military abilities and underestimate the United States' reconnaissance strategies. Given the arsenal of high-tech gadgetry the US has at its disposal, the group asserts that Department of Defense thinking inflates the overall importance of dumb mines in deflecting a North Korean attempt to invade South Korea.
Most notably, the Pentagon underestimates the ability of North Korean troops to negotiate minefields, either by setting off explosives that would trigger the mines, or by simply playing a macabre game of follow the leader, where each successive leader clears a new leg of the path by blowing himself to heaven.
"To be blunt," retired Lt. Gen. James F. Hollingsworth writes in the introduction to the report, "if we are relying on these weapons to defend the Korean peninsula, we are in big trouble." Hollingsworth was responsible for drafting two 1970's defense plans along the main invasion route from North to South Korea.
The report also calls into question Pentagon postulations that the North Koreans, confronted by a "US contingent with complete control of the air," would be able to race through rugged mountain terrain. It then notes that Pentagon gamers applied the same scenarios unequally to American and North Korean forces, theorizing that monsoon-like rains would "ground allied reconnaissance and combat aircraft but somehow not appreciably slow the advance of North Korean forces."
No matter how reasonable Demilitarization's criticisms are, however, the Pentagon's war game rationale may be impervious to logic. After a May briefing revealed that a year after Perry made his dire predictions new runs of the war game left Seoul standing, briefers still maintained that Perry's "tens of thousands" of soldiers would be put at risk by the removal of landmines.
Despite such arguments, Demilitarization seems hopeful that its report will have an impact on the United States' position at the Oslo conference, which kicked off Sunday and will run for three weeks. But the final negotiations are not scheduled until an Ottawa conference in December, and between now and then, there is still some room for influencing the president's stance. "We're hoping these findings will change Clinton's role in December," says Demilitarization's Nathanson. "But we can't say for sure."
There are signs that there's room for hope. The Pentagon is expected to issue an influential study on alternatives to US anti-personnel landmines in Korea. More important is senior director for Defense Policy and Arms Control Robert Bell's plan to query the Pentagon about its war game methodology and the credibility of its baseline assumptions.
Still, Demilitarization remains cautious. China and Russia still manufacture and export dumb mines, and if the Pentagon report relies on the same old war games, its recommendations won't waver. "[The] new openness is promising," says the report, "but will only bear fruit if the president can be informed of [investigations into the Pentagon's war-gaming methodology] well prior to the Ottawa conference."
