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Mines come in all kinds of forms; some of them are immensely powerful and can cause wide spread damage when they go off. Sometimes they're very small. They can be laid by hand or by machine or can be dispersed by aircraft or from missiles. There's one version which can be deployed by a Tomahawk cruise missile. One weapon we have for attacking airfields works by dropping a mix of bomblets intended to crater the surface of a runway and mines to prevent workers from easily repairing it afterwards. Such an attack can take an airfield out of the war for up to a week, and of course that can be repeated. Mines also vary enormously in sophistication. Sometimes the trigger is ridiculously primitive: during the Viet Nam War, the Vietnamese would take a tube blocked at one end, place several hand grenades in the tube which had had their pins pulled but which still had their handles, and then block the end off with a thin rod. This would be hung from a tree with a tripwire connected to the rod; if someone ran into the wire it would pull out the rod, and all the grenades would fall out and go off. Some of the most sophisticated ones are called "Bouncing Betties". Often these are also set off by a trip wire. They jump up about five feet and then detonate, spraying shrapnel in all directions causing wounds or deaths in a quite wide area. But the majority of mines are basically buried bombs, or bombs sitting on the ground. They can be set off with pressure fuses, or sound sensors, or with magnetic detectors which look for large metallic masses nearby (i.e. tanks). They might contain shrapnel or concentrate on concussion. Mines are a nearly ideal defensive weapon; nothing can bring an attack up short more effectively than a mine field. Mines are extremely cheap and very effective, and they brook no arguments. They're also a bitch to clear. Traditionally mines were made of metal, so they could be detected electromagnetically, with a great deal of work. A lot of mines now are made of plastic and are damned difficult to detect at all. Sometimes the mines have smart fuses so that they don't necessarily detonate on the first (or third) opportunity. In many cases the only way to get through a mine field was literally to go through on your hands and knees sticking a probe into the ground looking for hard buried objects. Doing that under fire was, shall we say, a bit daunting. So the next plan was to try to find faster ways of handling the problem. One trick invented all the way back in WWII was to hang a big rotating drum out front of a tank, with lengths of chain welded to the drum. It would rotate rapidly and beat the ground with the chain, setting the mines off harmlessly before the tank was near enough to be damaged. The British landed a few of these "flail tanks" at Normandy and used them to clear mines off the beaches there, which worked because the mines in question used pressure fuses. The best approach available now to the US to clear a track through a mine field involves a specially equipped APC. It has a rocket launcher mounted on it which fires over the suspected mine field. The rocket trails behind it a length of primer cord (plastic explosive) and after the whole thing is on the ground, it goes off and will set off all mines within a few yards on either side just from the concussion. That makes a channel through a minefield that vehicles and men can move through, but it doesn't clear the whole mine field. If you're not quite in as much of a hurry, you can mount a bulldozer blade on the front of a tank and push your way through, leaving a sunken road behind. The reason that mines are used so heavily is that they're cheap, easy to use and very effective. The US is capable of laying a very large mine field in just a few hours with a modified version of a cluster bomb. After Tora Bora fell, there were reports of large numbers of al Qaeda moving along a pretty restricted mountain path towards Pakistan: this would have been a classic case where mines would be useful for area denial. We could mine it by air and close it off to prevent them from escaping. We may have actually done that, in fact; I haven't seen any reports of them actually making it to Pakistan. The big drawback of mines is also their biggest advantage: they never tire, they never give up, they wait patiently until they're detonated. They keep doing that even after the war is over. All over the world, there is a steady toll of mine casualties in areas where wars have been fought (added to the c 
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