The Army is planning to buy foreign-made cluster munitions after the Pentagon canceled a policy last year that limited their use.
After the Pentagon scuttled a longstanding pledge to destroy its existing cluster-munitions stockpile, the Army is moving ahead with renewed vigor to acquire at least three new foreign-made versions of the weapons for its artillery. Late last year, the Trump administration canceled a Defense Department policy that limited the military’s ability to use cluster munitions, which, at a conference on Friday in Arlington, Va., Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan attributed specifically to the threat posed by North Korea.
Cluster munitions are a type of weapon that distributes smaller weapons, called submunitions or bomblets, over a targeted area. They have been condemned by lawmakers and arms-control groups for causing indiscriminate harm to civilians even decades after conflicts end. The now-abandoned policy, drafted in 2008 under Robert Gates, the defense secretary at the time, required any submunitions used after 2018 to have a dud rate, or the percentage of submunitions that don’t detonate when they are supposed to, of 1 percent or less — a standard the Pentagon appeared unable to meet, even a decade after the policy was put in place. The 2017 policy change stated that newly produced cluster munitions must have a dud rate of 1 percent or less, but left open the use of older cluster munitions with higher dud rates, which allowed the United States to maintain its large cluster-munitions stockpile. The Army has since ramped up its effects to seek newer cluster-munition models.
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According to military officials, the new generation of weapons the Pentagon is looking to buy is designed to selectively destroy armored vehicles and either self-destruct or deactivate itself if it does not find an appropriate target — making it theoretically less likely than older versions of the weapon to harm civilians. But bomb technicians, who are trained to always treat an unexploded submunition as armed and capable of exploding, say such safety features are inherently unreliable, because mechanical and electronic systems built into the submunitions can and will fail.
The United States military has used submunitions in many conflict zones, including Vietnam, Laos, the Persian Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. They were also used early on in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in naval missile strikes in Yemen. Many of these weapons failed to explode and littered the ground with “de facto land mines,” as one Army field manual described them, that remained dangerous long after those conflicts ended. The weapons have also harmed American forces in almost every war they have used them in.
