Our day started outside a Tim Hortons on the edge of CFB Gagetown outside of Fredericton, New Brunswick and ended at dinner in a Canadian Army mess tent.

Mines Action Canada, along with colleagues from Mines Advisory Group and the Canadian Red Cross had been invited to visit Exercise Ardent Defender by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Our group of civil society organizations were joined by representatives from Global Affairs Canada and Department of National Defence to see the exercise which brings together over 300 explosive ordnance disposal personnel from CAF Joint Counter Explosive Threat Task Force and around a dozen allied countries to train, share best practices, and develop responses to emerging explosive threats.

The focus of the exercise is improvised explosive devices which can include everything from 3D-printed munitions with multiple triggers to home made bombs in the trunk of a car. New and emerging technology like small quadcopter drones, AI, and robotics are also being used in the exercise. With conflict rapidly evolving in places like Ukraine, Exercise Ardent Defender helps Canada and allies be ready to respond to new threats. Each day, explosive ordnance disposal teams were given new challenging problems with different scenarios and devices to render safe. Some of the participants are there to learn while others are being recertified in explosive ordnance disposal. The first part of our day was spent with the teams making the devices while in the afternoon we got to see some of the day’s scenarios that teams had to solve. At the end of the day, we had a discussion about the visit and a surprisingly tasty dinner with our guides for the day in the mess tent for all the participants. 

The observers and one of the training locations - a mock mine shaft

While visiting this exercise might seem like a big change from MAC’s usual work on advocacy, youth, and inclusive disarmament, it was a very useful day and very inline with our work. A major development over the past two years has been the use of small commercial drones to drop explosives (landmines, improvised explosive devices, individual submunitions) on civilians and soldiers alike especially in Ukraine. Human Rights Watch and others have reported widely on this trend so it was very interesting to see how the CAF and allies are working to counter those threats.

The military and humanitarian organizations have different policies, procedures and priorities when it comes to clearing explosive hazards, but we all share the same goal, fewer deaths and injuries. The military are often dealing with explosives closer to front lines so they move faster and more focused on getting across barriers while humanitarian demining organizations need to clear the land for civilian use after the conflict. The techniques might be different, but everyone is facing the same evolving threats as improvised explosive devices have evolved from the pressure plates in Afghanistan and the glass jars in Colombia to explosives dropped from cheap commercial quadcopter drones in Ukraine. 

One major difference between Exercise Ardent Defender and humanitarian mine action is that after the explosive is rendered safe there is an entire set of investigative actions that take place. Remaining bits of the devices were taken back to a forensics facility to learn as much as possible about it including looking for indications of who made the device and how to help inform future efforts against similar devices and potentially support criminal prosecutions. Humanitarian mine action definitely does not have its own forensics lab!

As people find new and inventive ways to create dangerous explosives, military explosive ordnance disposal and humanitarian demining are going to need to learn from each other in order to keep people safe during and after conflict.