Man-Portable Obstacle Breaching
Conventional minefields, booby traps, unexploded ordnance and man-made obstacles, such as triple barbed wires and concertina coil will stall military operations. This has a devastating cost, as operational momentum and surprise once lost is hard to regain.
Time spent clearing enemy obstacles and minefields will severely degrade mission success and expose troops to hostile fire. Creating safe corridors, quickly through minefields and obstacles is essential to maintaining surprise and minimising casualties.
Traditional methods for clearing minefields involve low technology equipment such as grapnels or mechanised minefield clearing equipment. Use of heavy equipment requires combat engineers adding logistical burden to operating forces.
Key design considerations for the system were:
- Safety – ensuring maximum neutralisation of anti-personnel mine and expose any other ordnance. Additionally, the system needs to be safe to operate.
- Lightweight – the system needs to be light allowing combatants to carry the system with their standard combat load.
- Operability – the system was designed to ensure ease of use and remove dependence on combat engineers. Breaching enemy minefields and obstacles under enemy fire is one of the hardest things to do. A well trained infantry soldier is able to deploy the system under 1 minute.
- Straight line – one of the key requirements whilst creating safe lanes is to ensure these are linear. The system was designed to ensure it creates exceptionally straight safe lanes.
