US cluster weapons often fail to detonate Ukraine

When the White House announced on Friday it would agree to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine, it came after assurances from Pentagon officials that the weapons had been upgraded to minimize the danger to civilians.

The weapons, shunned by many nations, drop small grenades built to destroy armored vehicles and troops in the open, but also often fail to explode immediately. Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children they come across.

The Pentagon said the weapons they would send to Ukraine had a failure rate of 2.35 percent or less, much better than the usual rate common for cluster weapons.

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

They are 155-millimeter artillery shells that can each fly about 20 miles before bursting open in midair, releasing 72 small shells that typically detonate on impact along the perimeter of an oval-shaped area larger than a football field.

Pentagon officials have said the grenades they will send to Ukraine are an improved version of a type used in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But the reality is a bit more complicated. The shells sent to Kiev can fly farther than the earlier versions, but they contain the same shells, which the Pentagon said were unacceptably high.

Al Vosburgh, a retired army colonel trained in bomb disposal, said once the shooting stops in Ukraine, a massive education campaign will be needed to warn citizens of the risks of unexploded shells before they can safely return home return.

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

“You have to put in a lot of effort to clean those up because you’re not supposed to move them,” said Mr. Vosburgh, who now heads the nonprofit mine clearance organization Golden West. “In an area that’s full of them, you’re going to find a lot of duds, so getting rid of them is a slow and methodical process.”

But Biden administration officials said they had little choice but to supply cluster munitions, despite the continued danger of Ukraine firing through artillery shells and trying to make a profit in a grueling counter-offensive against Russian forces.

Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, defended the use of the weapons, saying Russia had been using them since the beginning of the war. Ukraine has also used Russian-made cluster munitions and has repeatedly asked for US-made ones, knowing that the United States maintains large reserves.

“Ukraine would not use this munitions in a foreign country,” Sullivan said. This is their country they are defending. These are their citizens they protect and they are motivated to use whatever weapon system they have in a way that minimizes the risk to those citizens.”

These types of weapons are banned in more than 100 countries, partly because more than half of the dead or injured are civilians. Neither the United States nor Russia or Ukraine has signed the treaty banning stockpiling or use.

Analysts say as many as 40 percent of Russian cluster munitions bombs have resulted in duds.

Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Department of Defense conducts extensive testing of the cluster munitions in its stockpiles, and “those we supply to Ukraine are tested at a rate of less than 2.35 percent. “

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

In a briefing to reporters on Friday, Colin H. Kahl, the Secretary of Defense for Policy, said the grenades sent to Ukraine had been tested five times between 1998 and 2020.

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

The timing of those tests coincides with the availability of a shell called M864 that ceased production in 1996, and an Army official confirmed Friday that the last live-fire reliability tests of cluster artillery shells the agency had conducted were on M864 shells in Yuma, Ariz. , in 2020.

The numbers of duds offered by Pentagon officials differ greatly from what bomb-disposal technicians and civilian deminers in the field find in post-conflict areas, including from the M864 projectile.

U.S. military bomb disposal specialists are trained to exercise extreme caution where cluster weapons have been used, and to expect that about 20 percent of all submunitions, regardless of country of origin, will fail to detonate.

The projectiles sent to Ukraine are usually referred to by the name given to those small grenades: Enhanced Dual-Purpose Conventional Ammunition, or DPICM — and pronounced dee-PICK-’ems by some officials.

The grenades, which are about the size and shape of a D-cell battery, are stabilized in flight by a nylon ribbon flowing from above. They weigh less than half a pound each and contain an explosive warhead that will fire down a jet of molten metal capable of penetrating six and a half inches of armor plate.

The blast also causes the grenade’s steel casing to fragment outward in hopes of injuring or killing unprotected enemy forces. Those two functions – anti-armor and anti-personnel – are the dual purposes referenced in the weapon’s name.

The Pentagon built millions of these artillery shells between 1970 and 1990, according to government records, and fired 25,000 during the Persian Gulf War. Combined with the 17,200 ground-launched missiles with the same type of submunition fired by the Army and Marine Corps, the United States launched more than 13.7 million shells at Iraqi targets in the 1991 conflict.

Army and Marine Corps artillery shells of this type are tested in Yuma, Ariz., in a relatively flat area of ​​hard ground free of vegetation, the ideal environment for the shells to detonate on impact.

But in a conflict, these shells are fired at a wide variety of places, resulting in dud rates as high as 10 percent, and in some cases even higher, especially when they land in water, sand, mud, or soft ground such as plowed fields. The fuzes on the grenades released by the M864 are designed to explode when they hit hard targets such as armored vehicles and bunkers, Mr Vosburgh said.

“Those detonators depend on impact, and if you get into something soft, you might not get the shock you need,” Vosburgh said. The lightweight grenades often get caught in tree branches or bushes and also fail to explode.

A senior defense official confirmed on Friday night that M864 grenades would be sent to Ukraine, acknowledging that environmental factors could affect their performance, but said the defense ministry did not believe terrain issues would result in a significantly higher number of duds.

The U.S. military designed many of its modern models of cluster weapons in the 1970s and 1980s with a primary mission in mind: to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe by dropping tens of millions of submunitions on tanks and armored vehicles in what was then the East. Germany during preparations for an attack.