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Constructing a Triple-Strand Concertina Wire Obstacle, by CPT Blackfox
Digging fighting positions, trenches, and emplacing various obstacles take a great deal of time and effort. The greatest danger in emplacing obstacles is not being thorough enough due to the difficulty involved. Stringing out wire and actually driving the pickets into the ground not only gives you good practice as how to physically create the obstacle but also gives you an idea of the challenges you will face and how long it takes to put up 100 lineal meters of obstacle.
Triple-strand concertina wire obstacles consist of two rolls of concertina wire side-by-side on the bottom with one roll on top. From the side, the obstacle resembles a pyramid. I will be going through this obstacle and how to emplace it, because it is the most difficult of all wire obstacles to breach and much easier to emplace than a concrete, wood, or earth barrier.
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It is possible to emplace obstacles by yourself, but it ends up taking much more time alone than it would with a group of two or three people. Concertina wire or razor wire tends to snag on itself, so it’s better to have one person on each end of the coil instead of letting one person struggle through stringing out wire on his own. If you have another person willing to help, he can get ahead and lay out pickets every five paces or five meters and dropping coils of concertina wire every 20 meters.
You need a pair of wire gloves for each person stringing wire. Heavy-duty leather gloves will work, but since concertina wire has little nasty razors on it, it can cut up a pair of leather gloves pretty badly if you are not very careful. If you are a novice or are planning on emplacing several hundred meters of concertina obstacles, you might want to get some reinforced wire handling gloves to protect yourself more adequately. The military grade gloves are heavy-duty leather gauntlets with staples in the palms and underside of fingers to prevent the concertina wire from snagging the leather. If you feel industrious, you might be able to improvise something like that with a pair of leather gloves and a heavy-duty plier-type industrial stapler with ¼” or 5/16” staples. Otherwise, just hold onto the two handles on each end of the concertina coil and be careful to grab the wire between the barbs when you place it on the pickets, and you should do fine. You will also need a pair of heavy-duty wire cutter pliers for each person stringing wire.
If you are able to get the military grade pickets with the built-in wire loops and the corkscrew bottoms, then that will make life somewhat easier on you in respect to tie-offs to the pickets. However, using regular green steel “T-Post” agricultural fence pickets presents no problem whatsoever. You would want to purchase T-Post or U-channel 2 ¼” x 2 ½” x 7’ tall pickets. You can buy these at most big-box hardware stores or at a farm supply store.
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