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A minelayer is any warship, submarine, military aircraft or land vehicle deploying . Since World War I the term "minelayer" refers specifically to a naval ship used for deploying . "Mine planting" was the term for installing controlled mines at predetermined positions in connection with coastal fortifications or harbor approaches that would be detonated by shore control when a ship was fixed as being within the mine's effective range.
An army's special-purpose vehicles used to lay are sometimes called "minelayers".
In World War II, the British employed the Abdiel minelayers both as minelayers and as transports to isolated garrisons, such as Malta and Tobruk. Their combination of high speed (up to 40 knots) and carrying capacity was highly valued. The French used the same concept for the cruiser .
A naval minelayer can vary considerably in size, from coastal boats of several hundred tonnes in displacement to destroyer-like ships of several thousand tonnes displacement. Apart from their loads of sea mines, most would also carry other weapons for self-defense, with some armed well enough to carry out other combat operations besides minelaying, such as the World War II Romanian minelayer Amiral Murgescu, which was successfully employed as a convoy escort due to her armament (2 × 105 mm, 2 × 37 mm, 4 × 20 mm, 2 machine guns, 2 depth charge throwers).
can also be minelayers. The first submarine to be designed as such was the . was another such minelaying submarine. Although there are no modern dedicated submarine minelayers, mines sized to be deployed from a submarine's torpedo tubes, such as the Stonefish, allow any submarine to be a minelayer.
In modern times, few navies worldwide still possess minelaying vessels. The United States Navy, for example, uses aircraft to lay sea mines instead. Mines themselves have evolved from purely passive to active; for example the US CAPTOR mine that sits as a mine until detecting a target, then launches a torpedo.
A few navies still have dedicated minelayers in commission, including those of South Korea, Polish Navy, Swedish Navy and Finnish Navy; countries with long, shallow coastlines where sea mines are most effective. Other navies have plans to create improvised minelayers in times of war, for example by rolling sea-mines into the sea from the vehicle deck through the open aft doors of a Roll-on/roll-off ferry. In 1984, the Libyan Navy was suspected of having mined the Red Sea a few south of the Suez Canal using the Ro-Ro ferry Ghat, other nations suspected of having similar wartime plans include Iran and North Korea.
A new type of magnetic mine dropped by a German aircraft in a campaign of mining the Thames Estuary in 1939 landed in a mudflat, where disposal experts determined how it worked, which allowed Britain to fashion appropriate mine countermeasures.
The British Royal Air Force minelaying operations were "Gardening". As well as mining the North Sea and approaches to German ports, mines were laid in the Danube River near Belgrade, Yugoslavia, starting on 8 April 1944, to block the shipments of petroleum products from the refineries at Ploiești, Romania.
"Gardening" operations by the RAF were also sometimes used to assist in code breaking activities at Bletchley Park. Mines would be laid, at Bletchley Park's request, in specific locations. Resulting German radio transmissions were then monitored for clues which could help deciphering messages encoded by the Germans using Enigma machine.
In the Pacific War, the US dropped thousands of mines in Japanese home waters, contributing to that country's defeat.
Aerial mining was also used in the Korean War and . In Vietnam, rivers and coastal waters were extensively mined with a modified bomb called a destructor that proved very successful.
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