Landmines

On June 21, President Biden fulfilled his campaign promise to reverse the Trump administration’s anti-personnel landmine policy by announcing a new near-global ban on anti-personnel landmine use by the U.S. military.

For decades, FCNL has worked to ban the use of landmines, which maim and kill indiscriminately, inflicting human suffering even long after conflict ends.

Russia is using landmines in Ukraine — and the US is in no position to criticize.

In the last two years, FCNL constituents have sent Congress over a thousand letters urging lawmakers to speak out against landmines. Yet despite President Biden’s campaign promises, the policy remains unchanged.

Two years ago this week, the Trump administration revised government policy on anti-personnel landmines to allow the U.S. military to employ, develop, produce, and acquire these indiscriminate and immoral weapons.

Landmines are ineffective, immoral, and recklessly negligent weapons because they do not discriminate between combatants and civilians. Even as U.S. taxpayers fund the removal of landmines globally, the Biden administration is allowing the U.S. military to develop and deploy new ones.

No U.S. president has ever signed the Mine Ban Treaty or directed full compliance with it.

FCNL’s Diane Randall joined a 35 other leaders in calling on President Biden to adopt a new landmine policy that sets the United States on course not just to “curtail the use of landmines,” but to ban their use without geographic exception, and to swiftly accede to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.

Today marks 100 days of stonewalling by the Secretary of Defense. On May 6, more than one hundred members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary Esper seeking clarification on the new U.S. landmine policy. Secretary Esper has not answered a single question.