Necessity is the mother of compromise

What’s so bad about cluster bombs?

Time to put my head in the tiger’s mouth!

Watching and listening to the furore over the US decision to give Ukraine cluster munitions brought flashbacks to similar debates over weaponry during my decade as BBC Defence Correspondent. Cluster bombs, Napalm, White Phosphorous, Depleted Uranium, anti-personnel mines – all have limitations, partial bans and so on, but even more, rouse particular emotional objections.

As a Defence Correspondent, it was part of the job to become comfortable with the technology of death, being able to calmly and clearly explain the ingenious means we have developed to kill, maim and generally demoralise our enemies. It’s also vital not to lose your moral compass and become desensitised, but a certain detachment and breadth of view remains necessary – I wasn’t paid to emote, but to explain.

So, when it comes to people getting worked up over particular weapon systems then I sometimes slightly roll my eyes. The nature of warfare is after all about applied violence while the whole nature of the Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC) is about trying to resolve multiple fundamental contradictions of combatants both maximising the ability to use violence to win while limiting it in particular circumstances. As the saying goes, it’s complicated.

In particular there is often a fundamental misunderstanding that the main criteria for a war crime is in most cases not the weapon itself but where and against whom it was used and the circumstances in which it was used.

Thus, White Phosphorous, which produces lots of white smoke but burns flesh, is legal to mark targets for other munitions but illegal if used to deliberately strike people. Napalm is legal against troops but illegal against civilians.

All weapons, whether precision-guided or not, are subject to the LOAC in terms of proportionality – balancing between the military value of striking the intended target and the risk of unintended casualties among civilians and non-military property. You cannot simply flatten half a town to hit a single tank.

And of course, it is that combination of lack of proportionality and indiscriminate targeting that is at the root of the rampant war crimes being committed by Russia. It is not the weapons they are using, but the way they are using them.

Which brings us back to cluster munitions. The Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions has 120+ countries signed up to ban them. The US, Ukraine and Russia are not signatories, so they are not breaking international law.

Cluster munitions were a mainstay of the Cold War, and for a clear reason – they are very effective, notably against large groups of forces. Seeing as NATO expected to be outnumbered by massed use of Warsaw Pact troops and armour then this mattered a lot. The problem with a normal shell or bomb is that its effect is unevenly spread – with a lot of destructive power at the point of impact, but with the effect rapidly falling away the further away you go from that point. Cluster munitions are composed of sub-munitions – bomblets – which spread over a much wider area creating lots of smaller explosions and so spreading the destructive power more evenly. A target is as much at risk at the edges as the centre.

Bluntly, if I am a Ukrainian, and see a Russian attack forming up, then my weapon of choice would be a well-aimed cluster munition or two to saturate the area. For a supply dump further away then a precision weapon like HIMARS is what is needed, but not to cover a spread out military unit. Nor are cluster munitions an inherently inaccurate or indiscriminate weapon – the targeting and the accuracy of the gun that fires them is the key here, as with any other shell.

So, what is the problem? Simply put, the dud rate. Figures vary, with claims of 10% plus not going off, while the US says the shells it will supply, each with 88 bomblets, have a dud rate of close to 2%. Those duds are of course a danger to civilians long after the conflict, for instance following the Vietnam War.

Beyond that, they are also subject to the same laws of armed conflict as any other weapon, which is not to be used against civilians and de facto in built-up areas. The Russians have already done this of course, as with other weapons.

The Ukrainians are also already using cluster munitions, but on military not civilian targets. They are also using them on their own territory so not only have the responsibility to clear up the duds but have made the choice that the problem of duds is outweighed by their military utility.

As I noted before, cluster munitions were a mainstay of NATO during the Cold War, regarded as an indispensable weapon, so why did most Alliance members sign up to the convention? The obvious reason was, as stated publicly, to prevent ‘unacceptable harm to civilians.’ That rationale was genuine, but to me, something else also lay beyond that.

When I spoke to some of those involved, then the answer, the deeper reason why they felt able to ban them, was they did not think they needed them anymore anyway. We were now in the era of limited conflicts and precision-guided weapons. Cluster munitions were an area weapon appropriate to an era of potential major conflict, and we had moved beyond that. The indispensable weapon had become dispensable in the post-Cold War world, where we would not be going to war with Russia and fighting big wars against a peer adversary.

Well, that assumption turned out well didn’t it? And I think this is key here. It’s all about perspective. We gave them up because we thought we could afford to give them up.

Now we have seen a return to major conflict in the European theatre and the parties to it think they are useful, and one of them, Ukraine, is prepared to deal with tomorrow’s problem of duds on its own territory in order to help it recover that territory today.

In that context, I think the reporting about opposition to the US decision is overblown. Having signed the convention those NATO nations will feel obliged to say they disagree, but that is it. Maybe I will be proved wrong, but no-one will want a major row, especially with the US, distracting from the more important task of NATO helping Ukraine.

As I have said, it’s not the weapon but how it is used that is most critical and, privately, they will most likely be more understanding of the US and Ukraine than they can say. In Ukraine’s position what would we do?