Underground Combat, Part 1

Gary Clifton
VP Underground Operations & Lead Instructor
March 02, 2005

Introduction
Mines and caves provide shelter for enemy combatants and criminals, and hiding places for arms, drug labs, and hostages. Military and law enforcement personnel are confronted with two challenges when entering an underground opening: The hazards of the mine or cave itself, and the enemy within. Without some familiarization with underground workings, this environment can be as dangerous as the adversary it hides. Rather than focusing on the mission, the soldier or officer will worry about rockfalls, open holes, getting lost, and other concerns, all at the expense of locating his objective. Pathfinder offers a comprehensive underground combat training course at an abandoned copper mine in the mountains of western Nevada. This course provides instruction on the location and configuration of underground workings, surface assault, underground combat tactics, and mine hazards. This course is the only one of its type in the United States.

Mines and Caves
Mines, by definition, are excavations whose purpose is to extract minerals. Mines can be on the surface, such as an open pit copper or coal mine, or underground, such as a gold or silver mine. Every country has thousands of underground openings, large and small, that were excavated to extract one valuable mineral or the other, including gemstones. If these constitute a ‘mine’ depends on if the operation was successful of not. The great majority of surface excavations are actually prospect pits or ‘prospects’ that go in only a few yards and yielded no commercial minerals or ‘ore’. Prospects are everywhere in mountainous terrain and are excellent hiding places for men and arms. Caves can be natural openings such as limestone caverns or lava tubes, or man-made excavations. An opening in the side of a hill constructed for the purpose of storing food or weapons, or for shelter, can be termed a cave. Prospects and man-made caves are typically shallow, straight, and smooth-walled and present relatively few hazards to an assault team. Mines and large natural caves can have multiple openings, multiple interconnected levels, and contain various hazards such as unstable rock, bad air, and animal life that can occupy a well-trained team for weeks. The unique characteristic of all mines and caves that make them dissimilar to any other fighting environment is that they are utterly dark; once beyond the entrance, the only light will be that which is carried in.

Mines and Mountains
In Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations personnel encountered hundreds of mines and man-made caves. Cave-clearing became a full time job for soldiers who had never been underground or had received even basic instruction in mine geology. Testimonials from returning soldiers convinced Pathfinder that there was a need for a training facility that both looked like the Middle East and contained the types of old mines that are typical of Third-World countries. The mountains of western Nevada fit the bill. Nevada is replete with old and abandoned mines, most of which are surrounded by federal lands and are located at an elevation of 5000-8000 feet (Photos 1 and 2). Pathfinder’s training site near the town of Yerington, Nevada, consists of thousands of acres, containing hundreds of mine openings, surrounded by hundreds of square miles of rough, arid, mountainous terrain. The site is ideal for teaching mine geology, surface assault tactics, and underground reconnaissance, mapping, and combat.

Pathfinder’s main facility is a multilevel underground copper mine (Photo 3). The mine contains four levels totaling over 3000 feet of underground workings, four entrances, and numerous surface excavations. The mine has not been sanitized and contains numerous deep, open holes, large open chambers, and dead end tunnels. The mine was abandoned in the 1920’s and is essentially unchanged. Despite its antiquity, the mine is stable, dry, free of gas and animal life, and perfect for instructing serious professionals. The mine has been equipped with remote controlled pop-out targets for live-fire exercises, and been used for force-on-force combat drills using Airsoft weapons.

Mine Geology
You are a soldier and your job is to clear a group of mine tunnels. You don’t have maps of the mine workings, so you have no idea of where other entrances might be, how deep the mine is, or even if the air in the mine is fit to breath. Can some if this information be obtained through study of the surface workings before you advance on the complex? The answer is: Yes. Mine Geology is the study of mineral deposits; how and where they are formed, what are their surface manifestations, and how to extract or mine them. A trained mine geologist can read the surface exposures at a mine like a book. This can be done from a distance with binoculars or from color photographs. Information that can be obtained includes the size or extent of the underground workings, the orientation (direction) of the workings, how many levels are present, the number and location of entrances, the type of mineral that is being mined, if poisonous gas or hot water is likely to be present, the likelihood of unstable ground, the type of explosives used, the best place to ‘cave’ or close an entrance, the location of other mine workings in the vicinity, and other items. The location of mines is never random and their construction is usually logical. A basic knowledge of mine geology allows the soldier to visualize the mine in 2 and 3 dimensions, providing him with a real advantage during assault and clearing. Pathfinder’s Underground Combat courses includes several days of ‘reading the rocks’ or basic mine geology.

Mine Assault

Pathfinder’s Nevada Training Site (NTS) contains hundreds of prospects and mines. The terrain is steep and sinuous, providing endless scenarios for advancing on old mine openings during daylight, nighttime, and with night vision. Besides keeping one’s self out of the line of fire, the trick is to anticipate which mine openings could harbor an adversary. Mineral deposits are typically tabular features that at the surface define a straight line that may continue up and down hillsides and across stream valleys. Prospects and mine entrances along the exposure of the deposit define a ‘line of lode’ that will contain the majority of the openings (Photo 4). Depending on the size of the dumps at the entrance to the openings, the tunnels and prospects may or may not be connected. No soldier wants to be cornered in a dead end tunnel; thus, study of the mine openings before an assault may provide clues to the most likely defensive positions. Similarly, a sense of how deep the openings are and if they interconnect can provide the soldier an offensive advantage if the openings are located along his path of advance.

Mine Clearing

The entrance to a mine tunnel, termed an ‘adit’, is like the door to a building. It is the obvious place to stop an advance and the easiest place to target from the inside. The mine entrance is the only source of light to the inside and any obstruction of the light is a signal that someone is at the entrance. From the inside, the entrance is a small, intense beam of light, a clear target for a shooter who is trying to defend the interior. A soldier advancing into a mine is safer in the mine than at the entrance, because once inside and positioned against a wall his body is too small to obscure the light. In addition, it is very difficult to site on a target that is at the end of a tunnel; if the soldier is against the wall and is not backlit, he is probably safe from an intentional shot. Advancing into the main tunnel, a soldier will be safest if positioned low and against the walls, again because of the difficulty of targeting. The walls of most tunnels are rough and irregular, thus there is little chance of a ricochet of an intact projectile. Firing a weapon within a mine can instantly deafen a shooter and anyone around him because of the confined space. Hearing protection is essential. Discharging a weapon will also kick up clouds of dust in a dry mine, obscuring the line of fire.

Mines of all types contain numerous hazards that can be fatal to a novice. The greatest danger is open holes beneath your feet, not falling rock (Photo 5). Mines don’t spontaneously ‘cave in’ when someone passes by. Old mines are abandoned after the last available ore has been removed, which is often contained in columns of rock that support the roof, walls, floors, and rails. The possibility of stepping into a bottomless hole between old rails, or sliding into a hole at the side of a walkway, is the greatest danger in an old mine. Short of pulling at loose rocks or old timbers on the walls or the roof, there is relatively little chance of being struck by falling rock. Loose rocks can be dislodged by the concussion of a fired weapon, however, and care must be taken to fire in a safe area, if possible.

An understanding of what ore deposits are can help make sense of an underground mine complex. Large openings or ‘stopes’ are where ore has been extracted, and tunnels are positioned to remove the broken ore from the mine. The pattern of tunnels and other passageways can often be predicted after a short time in a mine (Photo 6). Larger mines may have several levels. Vertical connections between the levels, termed ‘raises’ and ‘winzes’, provide for ventilation and a way of moving ore and waste rock to the points of easiest extraction. The vertical openings may extend to the surface and provide an entrance or exit to the mine. Training in a suitably extensive underground mine can provide valuable insight into navigating a new underground complex, how to anticipate entrances and exits, and where people or weapons might be located.

Author

Gary Clifton has been in the minerals exploration industry for over 30 years. He holds degrees in geology and geochemistry from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and has completed postgraduate work at University of California at Berkeley, and Oregon State University in Corvallis. Gary has published on various topics in minerals exploration and reservoir engineering, been a guest speaker at numerous scientific meetings, and was a research associate for 6 years at the university level and with ARCO Oil and Gas Company in Texas. For the last 15 years, he has been involved with gold exploration in Nevada and has consulted for most major mining companies. Before obtaining his degrees, Gary worked as an underground miner in Idaho, Queensland, and Tasmania, and since that time has visited dozens of underground mines as a professional geologist.