I'm not sure what audience this Flash animated demonstration of a "self-healing minefield" is intended to reach. I mean, are there DoD higher-ups who don't like coming in to the office if they don't have to? Does the President get a weekly e-mail filled with interesting links now, instead of the fat manila envelopes hand-delivered to the Oval Office that movies and TV have taught me to expect?

The site doesn't have much to say about how exactly these mines are supposed to move around. They "hop," it says. I'm not "up" on military hardware, but I know that there are, currently in existence, mines which pop up into the air before they explode. However, it seems like most of these rely on some sort of propellant charge intended only to get them at about head level or so. Presumably a whole new locomotion method would be needed for mines intended to move around regularly without exploding. Here's a page about some different kinds of landmines, including "bounding fragmentation" mines: Norwegian Peoples Aid Mine Action program. Includes helpful disarming instructions.

Anyway, I wonder if the mines hopping around was their first idea, as opposed to giving them some sort of robotic undercarriage to crawl around the battlefield with. Which I suppose might be way too expensive. But what I'm thinking is, there is at least one research lab out there working on a spider-like (Actually, horseshoe crab-like. I saw it on TV!) robot that could, they hoped, someday be used for landmine removal, apparently just by finding the mines and blowing them up, as I recall. So presumably the planned production cost was not going to be all that high. What I'm envisioning is a field of mobile landmines engaged in heated personal combat with swarms of mine-seeking suicide robots.