More than 120 countries have joined a convention that prohibits their use as inhumane and indiscriminate, largely due to high dull rates, which release unexploded submunitions that endanger friendly troops and civilians alike. often for decades after the end of a conflict. United States, Ukraine and Russia, which allegedly used them extensively in Ukraine, are not part of the convention. Eight of the 31 members of the I’LL TAKEincluding the United States, have not ratified it.
The main weapon under consideration, an M864 artillery shell first produced in 1987, is fired from 155mm howitzers the United States and other Western countries have provided to Ukraine. In their last publicly available estimate, more than 20 years ago, the Pentagon assessed that artillery shells had a 6 percent “miss” rate, meaning that at least four out of each of the 72 submunitions each shell carries would remain unexploded in an area. of approximately 22,500 square meters, approximately the size of 4 and a half soccer fields.
“We are aware of reports going back several decades that certain 155mm DPICMs have higher failure rates,” said a defense official, one of seven Pentagon, White House and military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. discuss the delicate decision. The defense official used the acronym of Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Ammunition.
The Pentagon now says it has new assessments, based on tests as recent as 2020, with failure rates no higher than 2.35 percent. While that exceeds the 1 percent limit mandated by Congress every year since 2017, officials are “handpicking” munitions with a failure rate of 2.35 percent or less to transfer to Ukraine, the spokesman for the government said. Pentagon, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder.
The defense official noted that details of the new tests “could not be disclosed,” including how, when and where the tests were conducted, and whether they included actual firing exercises or virtual simulations. Military manuals say that these weapons cannot be fired during training because they are part of war reserves.
There is no waiver provision in the 1 percent limit that Congress has set on cluster munition failure rates, included in the appropriations of the Defense Department during the last seven years. Biden would bypass it and Congress, according to a White House official, would remove ammunition from existing defense stocks under a seldom-used provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, which allows the president to provide aid, regardless of appropriations or restrictions on arms exports, as long as it determines that it is in the vital national security interest of the United States.
The Associated Press first reported Thursday on the final US decision to provide them to Ukraine.
Although USA has used cluster munitions in every major war since Korea, no new ones are believed to have been produced for years. But up to 4.7 million cluster projectiles, rockets, missiles and bombs, containing more than 500 million submunitions or bomblets, remain in military inventories, according to US estimates. Human Rights Watch Extracted from Department of Defense reports.
A 2022 Congressional Research Service report to lawmakers noted “significant discrepancies between failure rate estimates” of cluster weapons in the US arsenal, with some manufacturers claiming 2 to 5 percent, while mine clearance specialists have reported rates of 10 to 30 percent.
Nonproliferation experts said the 2.35 percent failure rate assessed by the Pentagon likely refers to aging projectiles with upgraded fuses designed to improve their ability to self-destruct, but it was impossible to know without access to test data. .
Proponents who have warned against the use of cluster munitions say the lower failure rates are the result of testing under idealized, unrealistic conditions that do not take into account real-world scenarios. Army ordnance manuals have said that even the military’s own miss rates can increase depending on the angle of impact and the type of terrain on which they fall.
“It is disheartening to see the long-established standard of 1 percent unexploded ordnance for cluster munitions reversed, as this will result in more failures, meaning an even greater threat to civilians, including deminers,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch.
What is a cluster munition?
Cluster munitions, also called cluster bombs, are projectiles that contain tens or even hundreds of smaller bombs, also known as submunitions. These projectiles can be launched from aircraft, from missiles, or fired from artillery, naval guns, or rocket launchers, among other ways.
At a pre-set height, depending on the target, the shells open and the bombs inside are scattered over a given area. The submunitions in turn carry a delay fuse to explode at a certain time, closer or on the ground, spreading its shrapnel that is designed to kill soldiers or eliminate armored vehicles such as tanks.
What kind of cluster bomb is the one that the United States will give to Ukraine?
The United States has a stockpile of cluster munitions known as DPICM, or Dual-Purpose Enhanced Conventional Munitions, which it no longer uses after making the decision in 2016 to begin phasing them out.
According to an article on the US Army’s eArmor website, the DPICMs that Washington will give Kyiv are fired from 155mm howitzers, each shell carrying 88 mini-bombs. Each submunition has a lethal range of about 10 square meters, so a single shell can cover an area of up to 30,000 square meters, depending on the height at which the bomblets are released.
The submunitions inside a DPICM projectile may also be shaped charge, a type of specialized anti-armor warhead that, when hitting a tank or armored vehicle, “creates an armor-piercing jet of molten metal,” the article says, adding that 10 or more submunitions may be needed to destroy an armored vehicle, but a single one may be needed to disable the vehicle’s weapons or render it immobile.
Have cluster bombs been used before in the Ukrainian war?
Yes, both the Ukrainians and the Russians have used cluster bombs since Moscow forces invaded in February 2022. More recently, Ukrainian forces have begun using Turkish-supplied cluster munitions on the battlefield.
But Ukrainian officials have been pressuring the US to provide its cluster munitions since last year, arguing that doing so would give more ammunition to Western-provided artillery and rocket systems and help reduce Russia’s numerical superiority in artillery. .
