Made Do or Left Waiting: Improvised Arms, Traps and Directional Mines

A farm scythe blade reforged at a right angle to its shaft and reinforced with a collar or bolts. Peasant and rebel forces that could not afford swords or firearms carried it from the Hussite armies of Jan Zizka through Sedgemoor in 1685 and the Vendée revolt. Its best known use was the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794, when scythe-armed kosynierzy charged and captured Russian artillery.

A sharpened bamboo spear about two meters long, rooted in Javanese martial tradition and court sparring contests of the Majapahit kingdom in the fifteenth century. Indonesian fighters took it up in the National Revolution against Dutch rule when firearms were scarce, and it remains a national symbol of the independence struggle.

The simplest stop on the path: a bamboo pipe, a piece of wood, a nail and a live small arms cartridge, arranged so that pressure drives the nail into the primer and fires the round at whoever triggers it. Military handbooks describe it beside the punji stick among improvised guerrilla traps of jungle warfare such as that of the Vietnam War.

A row of metal barbs 35 to 75 millimeters long set pointing upward to puncture the tires of a wheeled vehicle; some versions use hollow spikes that let air escape slowly to lower the risk of a crash. It descends from the caltrop, an ancient anti-cavalry weapon, and the United States Army has used strips at vehicle checkpoints in Iraq.

Russian for lightning: a booby trap the Soviet KGB used to guard concealed equipment caches abroad, reportedly emplaced from at least 1955 into the 1970s. Safe handling required a precise sequence of steps, and one device found near Belfaux, Switzerland, in 1998 detonated when Swiss authorities probed it with a water cannon.

A directional fragmentation mine developed by East Germany with Czechoslovak help and first installed in 1970. About 60,000 tripwire-triggered, cone-shaped mines were mounted on posts along roughly 440 kilometers of the Inner German Border, firing fragments up to 25 meters, until outcry after a 1976 defection that recovered an intact device led to their removal by 1984.

A Soviet Claymore-shaped directional mine with a plastic body, carrying 6.2 kilograms of RDX and scattering about two thousand steel rods across a 54-degree arc to ninety meters. It is usually command-detonated or wired as a booby trap and mounted above ground, often in a tree, to spread its fragments more widely.

The enlarged version of the smaller MON-100, named for its roughly two-hundred-meter killing radius. About 434 millimeters across and weighing roughly 25 kilograms with 12 kilograms of TNT, it can damage light vehicles and helicopters as well as personnel, and mines of this MON series have seen renewed use during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

A British air-dropped area denial mine delivered through the JP233 runway-cratering system or the Hades variant of the BL755 cluster bomb. It descends by parachute, rights itself, arms after a delay and can self-destruct on a timer from minutes to more than a day. The Royal Air Force destroyed its remaining stock on 19 October 1999 under international bans on anti-personnel mines.

A British naval influence mine from BAE Systems that senses the acoustic, magnetic and pressure signature of a passing ship and detonates only once its logic confirms a genuine target. Submarines could lay it through torpedo tubes, or aircraft, helicopters and surface ships, with warheads from 100 to 600 kilograms. A Mark III version was chosen in 2000 for the Royal Australian Navy, though that program was later cancelled.

The path ends with a device built like a Claymore but meant not to kill: a flash-bang plus roughly six hundred rubber or plastic balls across a sixty to eighty degree arc out to about thirty meters. Its back plate carries a raised diamond pattern and light green color so it cannot be mistaken for a real Claymore, and it can protect sites such as embassies.