Daniel Larison on Biden’s Cluster Munitions Blunder

The Biden administration is making a huge mistake:

President Biden has approved the provision of U.S. cluster munitions for Ukraine, with drawdown of the weapons from Defense Department stocks due to be announced Friday.

The move, which will bypass U.S. law prohibiting the production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1 percent, comes amid concerns about Kyiv’s lagging counteroffensive against entrenched Russian troops and dwindling Western stocks of conventional artillery.

Cluster munitions are an inherently indiscriminate weapon, and they pose an ongoing threat to the civilian population of a country long after the war is over. There is no good reason to provide or use these weapons. This decision will likely come back to bite the administration in more ways than one.

Even if the munitions that the U.S. provides have a dud rate of 2% or less, that still guarantees that there will be more unexploded ordnance lying around after these weapons are used than there would have been without them. Ukrainian civilians and soldiers will be among those getting maimed and killed by these weapons. Ukraine will already have a huge job of removing mines ahead of it once the war is over, and this will make that effort even more difficult and dangerous. Foreign Policyquotes Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, as saying, “There’s a civilian impact that we know about. Right now, Ukraine is full of bomblets coming from Russian cluster [bombs] but also minefields. The unexploded ordnance is terrible there. So using U.S. cluster [bombs] is just going to add to the problem.”

The supposed benefits of providing these weapons are not as great as advertised, either. As Daryl Kimball has explained many times in recent days, the utility of these weapons has been exaggerated. He wrote this for Just Security earlier this week:

The effectiveness of cluster munitions is significantly oversold. Kyiv has already allegedly used cluster munitions in Eastern Ukraine in 2022, and the use of the weapon did not deliver results that could not have been produced by alternative munitions, and their use of these weapons put civilians in Ukraine at much greater risk. When Russia was reported to have used cluster munitions in Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, condemned the move saying that cluster munitions are “banned under the Geneva Convention” and have “no place on the battlefield.”

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.