Mines and Shells in Ukraine Remind NATO Old-Fashioned Tech Matters

The war in Ukraine is showing that weapons once thought redundant remain indispensable — and NATO countries are playing catch-up as they race to rearm.

Last week, Finland became the latest European country to repeal a decades-old ban on the use of anti-personnel land mines. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have already announced they were abandoning the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which prohibited the use, manufacture, and sale of anti-personnel land mines.

The countries are gearing up to fortify their borders with Russia using land mines as the Kremlin refocuses its economy on its military and relations with the West deteriorate.

While the war includes examples of cutting-edge technology, it also underlines the importance of weapons like shells and mines.

As Europe enters “an era of rearmament,” it’s learning it needs to invest in technology it previously thought would be redundant in fast-moving, tech-heavy wars they envisaged would define the 21st century.

Ukraine has used mines to slow the larger Russian army’s advances in the east and south of the country to a stalemate and to channel enemy troops into areas that its forces can defend.

While the sophisticated precision-guided missiles NATO has provided Ukraine are susceptible to Russian electronic jamming that scrambles the signals used to guide them, comparatively crude — and cheap — shells don’t have this drawback.

Ukraine’s European allies have boosted shell production. But last week, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia was on track to build a shell stockpile “three times greater than the United States and Europe combined.”

In a recent paper, the Royal United Services Institute, a UK defense think tank, said European governments had expected private sector defense firms to “solve the problem” of ammunition production but failed to introduce “any incentives or a regulatory environment that would allow it to do so.”

Nato had been planning for a different war

Paul van Hooft, a defense research leader at the UK-based think tank RAND Europe, told BI that the threat from Russia was very different from what Western military leaders had planned for.

“For three decades, as Western militaries were not focused on large-scale land warfare and territorial-NATO collective defense, these weapons [such as shells and land mines] were not considered as valuable — specifically in Western Europe,” he told BI by email.

After the 9/11 attacks, NATO allies planned for wars against militias such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, where land mines and shells had little obvious use, said van Hooft.

But fighting a land war against a large army requires defending and holding large swaths of territory.

Artillery may be old technology but it’s more effective when used alongside newer surveillance tech like drones, said Van Hooft.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Defense and Security Department in Washington, DC, said that as the war in Ukraine has become more static, shells and land mines have once again been proven indispensable.

“These weapons become useful, even dominant, whenever the front lines stabilize,” he said. “They are difficult to employ when armies are maneuvering but easy to employ when armies stalemate and dig in.”

In Ukraine, drones have been used to surveil battlefields, identify troops gatherings or command posts — and pinpoint positions to target with artillery barrages.

Cancian cautioned against military planners becoming “enamored with flashy concepts of future warfare” as billions are poured into European defense budgets and military tech startups compete for business selling cutting-edge drones and AI-integrated weapons.

“Artillery-firing, unguided munitions are still critical,” he said, adding, “Notions that the next war would be fought by small teams firing precision munitions has not turned out to be the case.”