ACCESSION NUMBER:00000
FILE ID:96021401.POL
DATE:02/14/96
TITLE:14-02-96  U.S. COMPUTER PROJECT FIGHTS LANDMINE PROBLEM IN BOSNIA

TEXT:
(Aids NATO forces, humanitarian groups, civilians) (700)
By Wendy S. Ross
USIA Staff Writer

Washington -- To help prevent casualties in Bosnia from accidental
landmine explosions, the U.S. Department of Defense is providing NATO
peacekeeping forces and humanitarian organizations there with critical
information on the 36 types of landmines most commonly found in that
war-ravaged country.

Called BosniaFile, the computer-generated information is provided in
sets of three disks and includes pictures of the mines and general
information (in English) on their size and weight, metal content,
country of origin, and how they were placed in the ground.

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations
and Low-intensity Conflict Timothy Connolly, who briefed journalists
February 13 on the project, said about half of the 36 mines described
in the data base are anti-personnel and the remainder anti-tank.
"Seventy percent of them are of former Yugoslavian manufacture...and
the remainder are essentially former Eastern bloc manufacture," he
said.

The database provides pictures of each mine, gives a narrative
description of it, and tells where it is manufactured and in what
other places around the world such mines have been found. In addition,
the material contains information on the components of each mine and
its fusing mechanisms.

BosniaFile is Windows-based and uses little computer memory, Connolly
said. The information, he explained, is menu driven, can be easily
read on the computer screen, and can be printed out for further
distribution.

It is designed to give landmine information to individual members of
the NATO implementation force (IFOR) down to the platoon level and to
humanitarian organization personnel at the operational level.

To view the material, Connolly said, "all it requires is four
megabytes on the hard drive and four megabytes of RAM...and it will
also print to almost any printer that you may be able to connect to
your system."

Initially 500 of the disk sets are being distributed, he said. "We are
now in the process of identifying the units that they'll go to as well
as the organizations within the humanitarian community that will be
distributing them, and then we have the ability -- on very, very short
notice -- to continue to produce as many as demand may drive," he
said.

As these are not copyright-protected, "we anticipate there being a
natural proliferation within the region, by people just making copies
on their own. And we encourage that, because it is our goal to get
this kind of information as far down in the hands of operators,
whether they be IFOR members, whether they be humanitarian
organizations, whether they be economic rehabilitation people," he
said. "Anyone who is going to be operating in this region for the next
decade is going to benefit from knowing what it is that is out there.
And this is one of the ways we can do that."

Use of computers by troops in the field, Connolly pointed out, is
"very prevalent" now, even more so than a few years ago. Even in 1991,
when he was in a Desert Storm civil affairs unit in Iraq, he said "we
had computers down to the individual support teams, because a lot of
what you do now in terms of reporting and in terms of your data
collection, particularly in the civil affairs arena, which is where we
think these will be most heavily used, is all done in databases and
relational databases and word processing."

BosniaFile, Connolly explained, is an extract of MineFacts, a compact
disk developed last summer by the Department of Defense that contains
information on over 650 types of landmines, both anti-tank and
anti-personnel, throughout the world -- the only complete database of
its kind.

MineFacts was developed as part of the United States contribution to
the international effort to eliminate the landmine hazard worldwide.
"Every landmine that the intelligence community could identify as
having ever been put in the ground anywhere in the world, in any kind
of conflict," is included in the overall database, Connolly said.
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