Cluster weapons US is sending Ukraine often fail to detonate

WASHINGTON - When the White House announced on Friday that it would agree to

supply Ukraine with cluster munitions,

it came after assurances from Pentagon officials that the weapons had been improved to minimise the danger to civilians.

The weapons, which have been shunned by many countries, drop small grenades that are built to destroy armoured vehicles and troops in the open, but also often fail to explode immediately.

Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble upon them.

The Pentagon said the weapons it would send to Ukraine had a failure rate of 2.35 per cent or less, far better than the usual rate that is common for cluster weapons.

But the Pentagon’s own statements indicate that the cluster munitions in question contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14 per cent or more.

They are 155mm artillery shells that each can fly about 32km before breaking open mid-air and releasing 72 small grenades that typically explode on impact along the perimeter of an oval-shaped area larger than a football field.

Pentagon officials have said the shells they will send to Ukraine are an improved version of a type used in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm.

But the reality is slightly more complicated. The shells being sent to Kyiv can fly farther than the earlier versions, but they contain the same grenades, which had dud rates the Pentagon has characterised as unacceptably high.

Mr Al Vosburgh, a retired army colonel trained in bomb disposal, said that once the shooting stops in Ukraine, it will take a massive educational campaign to warn civilians of the risks of unexploded grenades before they can safely return home.

The biggest operational concern for Ukrainian soldiers, he said, is that dud grenades left on the ground by these shells cannot be moved safely by hand.

“You have to take great pains to clear those because you are not supposed to move them,” said Mr Vosburgh, who now runs the mine-clearance non-profit group Golden West.

“In an area that has been saturated with them, you are going to find a lot of duds, so it is a slow and methodical process to dispose of them.”

But Biden administration officials said they had little choice but to provide cluster munitions despite their lasting danger as Ukraine burns through artillery rounds and tries to make gains in a gruelling counteroffensive against Russian troops.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan defended the use of the weapons, and said Russia had been using them since the beginning of the war.

Ukraine has also used Russian-made cluster munitions, and had repeatedly asked for American-made ones, knowing the United States maintains large reserves.

“Ukraine would not be using these munitions in some foreign land,” Mr Sullivan said.

“This is their country they are defending. These are their citizens they are protecting, and they are motivated to use any weapon system they have in a way that minimises risks to those citizens.”

Weapons of this type are banned by more than 100 countries, in part because more than half of those killed or injured by them are civilians.

Neither the US nor Russia nor Ukraine has signed the treaty prohibiting their stockpiling or use.

Analysts say that as many as 40 per cent of the bomblets from Russia’s cluster munitions have resulted in duds.

Brigadier-General Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Defence Department does comprehensive testing of cluster munitions in its stocks, and “the ones that we are providing to Ukraine are tested at under a 2.35 per cent dud rate”.

Such a rate would mean that for every two shells fired, about three unexploded grenades would be left scattered on the target area. But the dud rate for these grenades has been observed at rates seven times higher in combat.

In a briefing to reporters on Friday, Mr Colin Kahl, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, said the shells being sent to Ukraine had been tested five times between 1998 and 2020.

“The tests themselves are classified,” he said, adding that he has high confidence in their results.

The timing of those tests matches the availability of a shell called M864, whose production ceased in 1996, and an army official confirmed on Friday that the last cluster artillery shell live-fire reliability tests the service had done were on M864 shells at Yuma, Arizona, in 2020.

The dud rate numbers offered by Pentagon officials vary greatly from what bomb disposal technicians and civilian de-miners find in the field in post-conflict areas, including from the M864 projectile.

US military bomb-disposal specialists are trained to exercise extreme caution in places where cluster weapons have been used, and to expect that about 20 per cent of all submunitions, regardless of the country of origin, will fail to explode.

The projectiles being sent to Ukraine are commonly referred to by the name given to those small grenades: Dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICM – and pronounced by some officials as dee-pick-’ems.

The grenades, which are about the size and shape of a D-cell battery, are stabilised in flight by a nylon ribbon streaming from the top.

Weighing less than half a pound each, they contain an explosive warhead that will fire a jet of molten metal downwards that is capable of penetrating 6.35cm of armour plate. The detonation also causes the grenade’s steel casing to fragment outwards in the hopes of injuring or killing unprotected enemy troops.

Those two functions – anti-armour and anti-personnel – are the dual purposes referenced in the weapon’s name.

The Pentagon built millions of these artillery shells from the 1970s to the 1990s, according to government records, and fired 25,000 of them during the Gulf War.

Combined with the 17,200 ground-launched rockets carrying the same type of submunitions that the army and marine corps fired, the US launched more than 13.7 million of the grenades at Iraqi targets in the 1991 conflict.

Army and marine corps artillery shells of this type are tested in Yuma in a relatively flat area of hard-packed soil that is free of vegetation, the ideal setting for the grenades to explode on impact.

But in a conflict, these shells are fired in a wide variety of places that force dud rates up to 10 per cent, and in some cases even higher, especially when they land in water, sand, mud or soft ground like ploughed fields.

The fuses on the grenades released by the M864 are designed to explode when they hit hard targets such as armoured vehicles and bunkers, Mr Vosburgh said. NYTIMES