“This material was used during World War II. It is still visible in forests or mosses here and there in Europe. They may look prehistoric, but, unfortunately, with the ongoing hostilities in Ukraine, they are still an effective tool,” says Kaspars Lazdins, Inspector of Latvia’s National Armed Forces Engineers.
Hmm.
They’re still as much of a problem for a tank to drive over, but I’m not sure that engineering countermeasures haven’t advanced. I don’t know what the state-of-the-art in dealing with these are, but I’d assume that they can be destroyed with explosives, and the ability to deliver explosives at range accurately has improved considerably since World War II.
kagis
This article, from last year, is talking about defeating them from the opposite direction; how Ukraine can deal with Russian dragon’s teeth:
As indicators emerged in late August of Ukrainian troops passing through the initial line of defenses in Zaporizhzhia, the U.S. think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, said the next Russian defenses likely consist of anti-tank ditches, dragon’s teeth and additional minefields.
Off the back of an apparent breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine could “blast” upcoming dragon’s teeth defenses with high-explosive anti-tank rounds, or engage combat engineers to manually remove the obstacles with plastic explosives, according to Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher with the War Studies Department at King’s College, London.
But it is not clear how sturdy Russia’s dragon’s teeth defenses are, and Ukraine’s military may be better off trying to circumvent them with smaller units rather than getting tanks involved, Miron told Newsweek.
The idea of dragon’s teeth is to “get the Ukrainians bogged down and ideally concentrated in that area,” she said. “This would mean the Russians could use artillery and drones to target troops and equipment.”
“The dragon’s teeth are not totally impassable, but they are a good distraction,” Miron said.
Dragon’s teeth are not complicated defenses to remove, but the problem comes when engineers dealing with them are under observed direct and indirect fire, Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with the Hague Center for Security Studies, told Newsweek.
Breaking through dragon’s teeth requires combined arms operations that cover the engineers with smoke, suppress enemy artillery fire and ideally put forward infantry forces, he told Newsweek.
“Fail to suppress that artillery at the right moment, get the smoke there too soon, fumble while trying to blow up the obstacles…any of these can ruin the attempt,” he said.
It sounds like one uses direct-fire weapons (“high-explosive anti-tank round”) rather than artillery, which is what I was thinking of. Maybe it hasn’t changed that much since WW2, then, other than maybe the ability of tanks to shoot accurately at them while approaching, using stabilizers.