Latest US Aid Package for Ukraine Probably Includes ADAM Anti-Personnel Mines

The US announced on Nov. 20 that approval had been given for a further $275 million worth of military equipment under a Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) Package. On the following day, the US Department of Defense made it clear that this would include anti-personnel landmines (APL) for the first time, even though they were not explicitly included in the list of weapons included in the PDA.

As Kyiv Post reported on Wednesday, officials said, in response to humanitarian concerns, the APL for Ukraine would be “nonpersistent,” which indicates that they would self-deactivate or self-destruct after a certain time interval to minimize the risks posed to civilians by those that remain “in the ground” after combat.

Currently, the US inventory only includes two self-sanitizing APLs that do not require additional special equipment to deploy the mines: the remotely 155mm artillery delivered “area denial artillery munition” (ADAM), and the Pursuit Deterrent Munition (PDM) which is a hand laid, modified version of the ADAM APL submunition.

The latest PDA included an unspecified number of 155mm artillery rounds, some of which commentators believe are likely to include M692 and M731 variants of the ADAM delivery system which is used to instantly lay an APL minefield in advance of enemy movement.

Each artillery round contains 36 ADAM APL mines. The mines include a self-destruct time element, the length of which is set at 4 or 48 hours depending on the model carried by these projectiles and will also become inactive after 14 days as the internal initiation battery discharges.

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Once the mine lands, it launches seven six-meter (20-foot) long tripwires after which the mine arms itself. From then on, any disturbance of the tripwires will trigger the battery-operated detonation system.

The mine contains a spherical warhead containing 22 grams (0.8 ounces) of RDX-based explosive held in a cavity that is filled with 51 grams (1.8 ounces) of M10 liquid propellant. Once triggered, the warhead is fired upwards to a height of between one and two meters (3.3 to 6.6 feet), where it detonates, producing approximately 600 fragments that travel outwards at 900 meters per second (3,000 feet per second).

The ADAM was one of the US “family of scatterable mines (FASCAM)” that were designed in the 1980s and included six different types of scatterable mine including the 155 mm artillery delivered Remote Anti-Armor Mine System (RAAM) projectiles. The US has provided more than 70,000 anti-tank counterparts to ADAM, each round of which deploys nine anti-tank mines.

FASCAM also includes the air-delivered GATOR, the vehicle-delivered Volcano and GEMMS systems, and the manually placed MOPMS which are combined anti-vehicle and anti-personnel landmine delivery systems.

The US adopted a new policy on APL in June 2022 which, according to National Security Council (NSC) spokesperson Adrienne Watson, would “align US policy concerning the use” of APL “outside of the Korean Peninsula” with the Ottawa Convention. Although that has yet to enter into force and with the background that Russia and Ukraine have both extensively used APL in the ongoing war then self-sanitizing mines such as ADAM are not raising the ante.