The Mine Warfare Association was formed in 1995 to create an awareness of mine warfare and to assist government, industry, and academia in optimizing their combined contributions to solving the challenges associated with military sea and land mine warfare. MINWARA’s founders believed solutions would be found in emerging technologies and sharing information. MINWARA established a program of conducting symposia to expose people and organizations to these emerging technologies and their application to mines, mining and mine countermeasures.
The symposia are an effort to cross-pollinate knowledge about mine warfare among government, industry, and academia. Symposia address military doctrine, policies, organization, concepts of operations, ongoing and needed research and development, acquisition programs, exercises and operation, and logistics and training programs.
Mine warfare includes both mining and mine countermeasures. Mine countermeasures includes the software, sensors, systems, tactics, techniques and procedures required to address the traditional mine threat as well as the potential threat from terrorist placed mines or improvised explosive devices (IEDs, to U.S. ports. The Mine Warfare Association is a strong supporter of mining capabilities , based on the tenet that knowledge of mine design and effects are critical to maintaining an effective mine countermeasures capability. The Mine Warfare Association is also a firm supporter of mine designs that have self-destruction capabilities after an appropriate period, so as not to pose a threat to civilians after cessation of hostilities.
The Mine Warfare Association has included the associated issues of humanitarian demining and unexploded ordnance challenges in our symposia at times, even though the present thrust of our association is military sea and land mine warfare. These issues and challenges have, and will be, included, based on the likelihood of historical and emerging solutions in these areas having application to military mine warfare. The subject of humanitarian demining is now a primary thrust of the Society for Counterordnance Technology (SCOT), the Wilson Institute and other non-governmental organizations.
The Mine Warfare Association understands the increasing importance of commercial industry in developing technologies which will benefit the Department of Defense. Accordingly, a major activity of the association is to expand outreach to the commercial sector.