Description of the DRES (Defence Research Establishment Suffield) Practice Mine Hardware

The development of scatterable mines and intelligent mine fuzes featuring full width attack capabilities has dramatically changed mine warfare. Unfortunately, not all mine training devices have kept pace with these developments. A distinction must be made at this point between those training mines classified as drill mines and those classified as practice mines. Drill mines are used to train engineer troops to correctly handle mines, while practice mines are used to train non-engineer combat troops about mine warfare. Drill mines therefore simply have to mimic the arming and disarming procedures of the newer types of mines they do not have to offer all the features of these advanced mines to have some training value. The practice type of training mine, because of its different training role, must emulate all features of the newer mines. However, existing practice mines do not do this they are, for the most part, unrealistic in form, activation mechanism, and result. Because of this, these devices have little training value, and consequently the troops who encounter them do not fully appreciate the problems associated with mine warfare. Canada.