Konstantin Mantzouranis on LinkedIn: It is amazing that a plain bloke such as myself immediately saw the trap… (2024)

Unbelievable!!! Just un-friggin’ BELIEVABLE!!! No PPE (perhaps a useless, but impressive -looking bulletproof vest that will not protect his throat & groin) NO faceshield… Mine lanes, properly-marked stakes, SOPs? Nahhh! Just waltz to wherever the heck strikes your mine-clearing fancy, unfold the detector and (Horror of all Horrors) slam it on the uncut grass & wave it around (trip-wires? detonator prongs? tilt-rods? - Nahhh! The Hell with them; just silly details! Just wave the detector’s coil and “maybe blo; maybe no-blo!”) Survivability chances in an actual minefield? Guaranteed, LESS than five minutes!———————————————————————CORRECTION: I just belatefly realized that this (part of a longer clip) was staged for TV about the dire HMA situation in Ukraine! Who has time to cut the grass, place fake mine stakes and make a section of his (safe) back garden to look like a proper mine-lane for the benefit of a TV crew? Cudos to the operator who probably helps to clear his own community! However, it relays a wrong message for inexperienced folks who may just grab a detector and move to clear their own (mined) piece of real estate!

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This is an interesting find—the only intact one—our team made in Babeldaob, Palau, back in 2019… When our searcher found it, I initially thought it was an illumination mortar) however, the dimensions and external protrusions were all wrong. The US and Japanese manuals in my smartphone did not have it, so I tagged it as “unlnown” and continued with the field work! When I went back to the office and started on the finds & classification daily report I had to spend hours looking until…. An Antiaircraft Mortar. I send the image to colleagues and informed them of this find. The response, incredulous laughter and fatherly advice to quit my job and pick-up pottery-making, or stamp collecting. My second communication had the technical specs…. That’s when (my) laughter commenced! Frankly, I would have dispersed the same advice to the finder of this item! Lesson of the Day? Everything is possible! Accept any crazy interpretation and commence researching it until proven wrong!

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Sometime during my tenure with Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) in Palau, I was approached by a local NGO (Debedebokel) which had obtained a grant by the United Nations Development Programme(UNDP) to run a PSA project in providing both MRE (Mine Risk Education) and also to start a program for local hunters & fishermen to report any Explosive Remnants of War(ERW) to the NGO, which in turn would notify us to run a Spot Task, identify the item, safely remove and render it safe! At some point, UNDP needed to submit a quantitative report of the amount of explosives removed off the island, during its funding period; I was therefore asked to conduct a detailed report that met stringent UNDP reporting requirements. Once the report was released, I went ahead and published it myself to avoid it being duplicated and used without permission! Use & dissemination is free; however, the publisher should include the original link:https://lnkd.in/dsP5GZY

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Visited the cosy “Gray House”, NKVD/KGB prison-cell accommodations in Tartu, Estonia. Not a happy place! Thousands of testimonials of the brutality of the Soviets, the Nazis, followed by worse persecution and wanton destruction by the vengeful SMERSH/GRU/SVAG-Soviets…. Left that place shaking my head, thinking that today Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in occupied Ukraine must have similar fraternal meat-grinders…

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Some readers harbored a basic question about the purpose of a fuze on a piece of ordnance, so I tried to answer his inquiry with this follow-up post attempting to explain basic concepts in a more simplified language: «Every piece of ordnance requires a “trigger” that will make it detonate. That trigger is called a fuze. There are many different ypes of fuzes, but will focus on the type of fuze mentioned in yesterday’s post, known as a “timed fuze”. A timed fuze can be pyrophoric, mechanical, chemical, or electronic! The purpose of a timed fuze is to make a particular ordnance (in this case an artillery projectile) detonate at a pre-selected time. Imagine you are a WWI artillery-man in Flanders, with a goal of killing cowering German troops, hiding inside a deep trench, at a distance! Typical artillery bombardments in the past showered the area with explosive shells, exploding literally feet away from the trench, merely spraying these troops with dirt. A cheaper & more effective way to kill them is to have an artillery projectile explode right above the trench and spraying them with shrapnel. It is easy to calculate a successful strike if you know the weight of the projectile, wind speed/direction, firing angle, projectile’s muzzle velocity, distance to the target that will allow you to determine the requisite number of seconds for the projectile to reach right above the targeted trench! your only challenge is to have a trigger that will make the projectile explode in mid air, at the right time! And here is where the timed fuze comes in handy! For simplicity’s sake, I will cover the easiest type of a timed fuze to understand, called the “Powder Train Timed Fuze” (PTTF). It is a piece of gear—typically made of brass & screwed at the tip of the projectile—that has a time-selector that will cause the projectile to detonate at the pre-selected timeframe! It is called a PTTF fuze, because it has two or three (rotatable) rings, lined with black powder that function like a traditional fuse…. Depending on the rotation you can make that projectile explode between zero seconds (in that case it serves as a plain impact fuze) and 30 seconds of flight! That black powder fuse ignites upon firing the cannon!EXAMPLE: A 75mm howitzer fires a 7kg projectile with a muzzle velocity of 2,200fps, filled with about a hundred 1/2”, lead balls with a black-powder exploder rod packed at the center. Target is 8 miles away and the ballistic sliding calculator gives it 16 seconds travel time! Next step is to use a tool that grapples the PTTF’s rotatable ring and set the 16-second mark to the appropriate notch. Upon firing, the sudden acceleration will drive an inertia firing pin into a tiny primer, which will ignite the black powder which will fire a larger primer 16 seconds later that will cause the black-powder exploder rod to burst, shattering the thin-walled projectile and spraying the tightly-packed lead balls in every direction!»

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I was toying with the movement of this Japanese Type 91 mechanical time fuze, and as I was depressing a particular pin with a dental tool, I suddenly I heard a buzzing noise of a winded movement and the control arm & setting disk started turning imperceptibly until the Striker Release Arm(SRA) fell into the Setting Disk(SD) notch and I felt in my hands a “click” as a spring-loaded pin went through its arming sequence! This would have normally released the striker—which it didn’t since it required acceleration from firing to release the retaining pin and also the centrifugal action of the spinning projectile which would aligned all mechanical components of the explosive train. Had the striker sprang downwards, it would have fired the (missing) primer below the movement, which would have ignited the (already removed) black-powder flash pan which would in turn shoot a jet of flame, through the aluminum foil, the brass disk and into a similar hole on the auxiliary fuze inside the projectile, which would proceed to ignite the remaining four stages of the projectile’s explosive train (secondary primer/gaine/booster/HE filler) to the final detonation! As a result, the spindle no longer spins freely—a result of that buzzing noise the movement made. However, I read the instructions multiple times, broke them down into segments and realized that what I had pushed was the clock’s starting plunger, which in turn allowed the SRA to fall into the SD, thus allowing the brass whatamajig, powered by the Torsion Spring(TS) to prevent me from pushing the Clock Starting Plunger(CSP) back up to hold-up the SRA in place. However, I needed multiple hands at that stage to achieve that, plus unscrew the entire movement, which risked separating the three-component, chrome-plated brass housing and witness an explosion of tiny steel compressed springs and pins in every direction! Three bent paper-clips held the housing in place, which was gingerly removed and then I managed—with the fourth hand I didn’t have—to push the spring-loaded Safety Lock(SL) sideways to allow the slightly lowered striker to expose its notch so I could relock it to the SRA. To achievethat I had to remove a dainty Release Arm Spring(RAS) AND push the SRA, half a millimeter inwards(against some internally hidden spring). So I managed to get three “switches” reset; however, the spindle still doesn’t spin freely, so I need at some other point to go back and continue where I left-off! I am NOT a clockmaker and this is essentially a 1934 Seiko (designed) movement (although this particular early fuze is so outstandingly made, with the best possible materials, that it is quite feasible, that this is one of the early pieces actually built by the House of Seiko, before the war compelled the Japanese to mass-produced the fuzes in their tens of millions, by every conceivable Mom & Pop clockmaker in the Empire, thus cutting corners to fulfill the desperately needed orders.

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Merry Christmas to All, and may 2024 account for less mayhem & suffering in Humanity’s fresh Killing Fields…

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THOUGHTS ON THE LATEST IDF/HAMAS FLAREUP - PART IIIΙ wonder whether parallels between Stalingrad and Gaza are being faintly drawn… If the Israelis are determined to expel the Hamas from Gaza—as they were equally determined to eject the Palestinians out of Lebanon in ‘82—how far & how determined will they be this time? I am afraid that the Hamas deliberately “stung” Israel to prod it to invade this hornet’s nest and bleed them Hard! In their expected Israeli invasion deliberations, the Hamas may even have included the US & the international community to put a stop to a comprehensive destruction, if Israel decides to pull a Fellujia on Hamas and starts dismantling this urban citadel, block-by-block; brick-by-brick! I am sure countless volunteers—among them Isis folks—will rush-in for their pound of flesh! I am mainly stating that Israel in its outrage may be entering truly unchartered waters this time!

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THOUGHTS ON THE LATEST IDF/HAMAS FLAREUP — PART I OF II The media references to the Yom Kippur are symbolic—rather than literal—considering the extensive planning & secrecy of the Hamas that led to a complete surprise for the IDF, and the collective shock by the Jewish people—of the forgotten fact that the Israeli nation was once again caught completely unprepared! The other parallel is the invasion—and holding off territory(regardless how insignificant—of the Jewish Homeland! Lastly, just like Yom Kippur, this attack may drive yet a stake through the heart of the fledgling diplomatic ties between KSA and Israel, and the strengthening anti-Israeli sentiment throughout the Levant & possibly beyond as the Israelis will certainly respond with sledgehammers against Palestinian ham-fisted blows. Some thoughtful observers will certainly reference how significantly richer, larger and more powerful Israel of 2023 is, vs. the Israel of 1973! However, just like any living organism, Israel got richer & bigger, at the cost of getting fatter & less agile! My personal take is that I see several similarities between the 1973 & 2023 fiascoes…. However, let us begin with CCCI (Communications, Command, Control, Intelligence) the same intelligence failures plagued Sin-Beth at both events! Total unpreparedness, caused by overestimating the “long reach” of Israeli military assets—but clearly no HumInt assets in Gaza that clearly atrophied…. Of course some may point out to a plethora of drones, Signal Intel. and A.I. monitoring assets. I would counter that UAVs are CCCI implements and not a miracle cure to strategic shortcomings. Look at how a simplistic coordinated Hamas attack by 4th rate fighters with sneakers, riding golf-carts, caught the fat & sloppy IDF with its proverbial pants down its swollen ankles…. The Iron Dome is also an excellent implement that failed miserably due to intelligence failures that failed to take into account a few thousand Qassam rockets raining into Israel.

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