Quote:U.S. to Send Cluster Munitions to Bolster Ukraine’s Fight Against Dug-In Russians

Biden administration aims to strengthen Kyiv’s hand despite concerns over risk to civilians

The Biden administration plans to send cluster munitions, which strew small bomblets over a wide area, to Ukraine to strengthen its hand in a high-stakes offensive against Russian forces, senior U.S. officials said.

The White House has agreed to grant a waiver under the U.S. arms export laws to send the weapons, formally known as dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICM.

The administration is expected to announce the decision Friday as part of a broader package of military assistance, U.S. officials said.

Ukraine has long appealed for the weapons, and the Pentagon has said they could be effective when employed against Russian troop and armored formations and Russian trench lines.

The munitions “would be useful, especially against dug-in Russian positions on the battlefield,” Laura Cooper, a senior Defense Department official, told Congress last month.

Human-rights groups say unexploded submunitions could maim or kill civilians long after a conflict ends, which initially made the White House’s National Security Council reluctant to approve the transfer.

But the possibility the cluster munitions could help Ukraine’s efforts at a critical stage in the conflict has swayed opinion within the administration and among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Proponents of the decision also say that the provision of cluster munitions would reduce Ukraine’s dependence on 155mm artillery shells, of which the U.S. has a limited supply.

More than 110 countries have signed an international Convention on Cluster Munitions that prohibits all use, transfer, production and stockpiling of cluster bombs. But the list of signatories contains notable absences.

The U.S., Ukraine, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and South Korea haven’t signed the convention. Neither has Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Turkey nor most countries in the Middle East.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, who didn’t confirm the decision, said that the Pentagon has several variants of the munitions. To mitigate the risk to civilians, the munitions that the U.S. has considered providing have a low dud rate, he said.

Older cluster munitions with dud rates higher than 2.35% wouldn’t be provided, added Ryder.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said in May that the provision of cluster munitions should be considered, particularly since the Russians were already using them.

“Our cluster munitions have a much lower dud rate than the Russian cluster munitions,” Smith told a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in May. “I’m not in favor of spreading cluster munitions around the world, but in this particular case the Russians are already doing that in Ukraine.”

According to the Human Rights Watch’s global Cluster Munition Monitor 2022 report, cluster munitions fired by Russian forces have caused at least 689 civilian casualties in Ukraine. Russian forces have attacked 10 Ukrainian regions with hundreds of cluster munitions, while Ukrainian forces have used cluster munitions rockets on at least two occasions, the group said.

While the provision of cluster munitions could give a boost to Kyiv, they are not a panacea since Ukrainian forces have also been slowed by dense Russian minefields.

The U.S. military currently reserves the right to use cluster munitions against U.S. adversaries, including in a conflict with North Korea.

In 2008, the Pentagon said that U.S. forces would only use cluster munitions after 2018 if their dud rate was less than 1%. But the Trump administration amended that policy in 2017, saying that cluster munitions could be effective against enemy forces operating across a broad area.

Quote:While the US hasn’t banned cluster bombs, its forces haven’t used them since one known incident in Yemen in 2009. The US had been producing and selling cluster bombs to its allies until a few years ago. In 2016, Textron Systems Corporation stopped producing MK-20s when the US stopped selling them to Saudi Arabia. But a congressional aide told Reuters that there are about one million of the bombs in US military stockpiles.
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Quote:A person familiar with the discussions further noted that the tranche, totaling around $800 million, will also feature “dozens” of Bradley and Stryker fighting vehicles, air defense missiles and anti-mine equipment.

Some of the older variants of the weapons have higher dud rates, with more than 2 percent failing to explode on deployment, Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters on Thursday. While he would not confirm a final decision, he said that if the Biden administration were to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, they would only send the explosives with low dud rates. Congressional restrictions prohibit the U.S. from selling or transferring cluster munitions with dud rates above 1 percent. Critics suggest the Pentagon’s estimates are too rosy and that battlefield conditions dramatically increase the likelihood of a dud’s explosion following an initial attack.

The decision to send cluster munitions, often referred to by their acronym DPICMS, would open the door for “new systems that have a DPICM variant,” including 155mm artillery rounds and longer-ranged missiles, they said in a March letter to Biden.
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