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  • The Development of Mine Warfare: A Most Murderous and Barbarous Conduct
  • David C. Isby
The Development of Mine Warfare: A Most Murderous and Barbarous Conduct. By Norman Youngblood. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006. ISBN 0-275-98419-2. Maps. Photographs. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 258. $49.95

This book is introduced as being the first of a new series from this publisher entitled "War, Technology, and History." Starting with the origins of subterranean mining in sieges, the book sets out to cover the development and use of both land and sea mines from the mid-nineteenth century, tracing the changes in attitudes, international law, and military acceptance as well as the many diverse paths of technical and tactical development through the two World Wars and post-1945 conflicts into today's world, in which land mines in the form of improvised explosive devices have proven to be the leading killer of Americans in Iraq.

The author has to cover 150 years of this broad set of related but nonoverlapping developments worldwide in 173 pages—the remainder of the book includes the texts of international conventions, notes, sources, and index. This limits the book's scope to a relatively brief (and somewhat uneven) historical survey. The book accomplishes this mission successfully, but its utility to the specialist is limited by both scope (a lot to cover in different areas in a few pages) and sources (almost total reliance on English-language published material).

In an area where many of the foremost innovators and practitioners have been German, Russian, Vietnamese, and others, and in which each applied their own rationale, opportunities, and technologies to mine warfare by land and sea, these limitations constrain the author's difficult task of explaining diverse significant developments in a relatively few words that will be of value to specialists and non-specialists alike. This also limits treatment of mines—made more deadly by technological innovations—in many of the more recent conflicts and the rise of de-mining as a major area of postwar reconstruction. Afghanistan, Angola, and Iraq share a handful of pages despite the importance of mines in each war; other conflicts appear not at all. The continued importance of mines today receives limited attention, although the international efforts to limit anti-personnel [End Page 276] mines is covered. The broad-brush approach loses the context of how the simultaneous changes in technological, warfighting, and international law all affected developments in mine warfare.

Clearly written, this book will be of primary interest to the nonspecialist. It does alert readers to the major changes and concerns in the area covered (although at the expense of context and analysis). Specialists may find value in the top-down overview and bibliography but are unlikely to take away much that is new or insightful. This book has succeeded in its (constrained) mission. One hopes that subsequent books in the series will be able to follow up on this initial effort and explore how to mesh breadth and depth in this challenging area.

David C. Isby
Alexandria, Virginia
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