Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
In his remarks, Kosiniak-Kamysz revealed that Poland could consider renouncing the Ottawa Convention, which aims at eliminating the use of anti-personnel landmines. But he added that “the arming of minefields will only take place when we are sure that war is inevitable”, reports broadcaster TVP.
Hmm. It might be possible to use mines that self-disarm. That addresses much of the UXO concerns, while still permitting for defensive use.
Would you walk through a field of "self-disarmed" land mines?
Much more happily than I would a field of non-disarmed ones.
Military explosives are generally pretty stable. They can't just explode when you bump them.
If your detonation mechanism requires ignition of a primer by a battery that (a) is runs a timer and then disables itself and (b) has batteries that only last so long anyway, there's not a lot that can reasonably set the thing off.
More complexity means more things that can go wrong.
But we do have smoke detectors, for example, with ten-year sealed batteries. I don't think I've heard of those having any failures.
A buried explosive will still have a non-zero chance of detonating.
Why would a country beef up it's borders against peaceful nations? They must be planning to invade us, we better attack first.
-Russia, probably.
Why would they make this public though? Wouldn't it be best to let them find out the hard way if they ever tried?
Or is this maybe so me sort of disinformation to cover up even more complex defenses?
It's not disinformation, but it is partial information. They're revealing enough information about their defense plans to make it clear that any invasion attempt on Poland will be costly. Russia does not have limitless resources. If they think they have enough resources to fight a war on two fronts, then it is in Poland's best interest to both bolster their defenses, and let the enemy know they've bolstered those defenses in hopes that it changes the war cost equation enough for Russia to realize it is not favorable decision anymore.
It's the geopolitical equivalent of finding out there's been multiple breaking and enterings in your neighborhood recently, so you go out and buy a gun and place a "this house defended by Smith & Wesson" sign out front. You don't tell them where in the house the gun is. You just give enough information for them to rethink their choice. The goal isn't to defeat the burglar. The goal is to not get broken into.
It's not like they are advertising specific mine placement. They showed pictures about trenches, anti-vehicles barriers, gates, etc. This stuff isn't hidden, a guy with a camera at the border could spot everything, let alone aerial or satellite imagery. It's about hardening the border and slowing down invaders. Then you layer it with more complex defense systems to support the static defense.
Also, there's a cost to keeping things secret in general. If you rely on something being a surprise, that's one thing, but...