Cluster bombs to Ukraine: who's right?
The US has announced it will supply Ukraine with cluster munitions, despite their being banned by 123 countries: has President Biden crossed a line?
I’m aware that not everyone spent as much of their childhood studying airborne ordnance as I did. I would go so far as to say probably none of you did (and if you did, who are you? Message me). So let’s get the technical bit out of the way at the beginning: what are cluster munitions? They are bombs or shells (air-dropped or ground-launched) which contain a number of smaller explosive ‘bomblets’, or sub-munitions, which are ejected or released over a wide area. These sub-munitions are individually less destructive, of course, but can cause damage over a much wider area than a single bomb. They were first used in the Second World War, by the Germans, I’m afraid, and the first operational model, the Sprengbombe Dickwandig 2 kg or SD-2, was used in 1940 in an air raid on Ipswich. In fairness, the leading Allied nations developed similar devices independently, so we needn’t point fingers.
The use of cluster munitions (by signatories) was prohibited by the Convention on Cluster Munitions which was adopted in Dublin on 30 May 2008. It was opened for signatures later that year and came into force on 1 August 2010, having been ratified by 30 countries. The UK Parliament passed the Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Act 2010 on 25 March 2010, in the very last days of Gordon Brown’s government, the opposition parties having pledged their support, and the Labour government also promised to dispose of all stocks of cluster munitions by 2013. This was achieved on schedule, with 190,828 cluster munitions and 38.7 million sub-munitions being destroyed by December 2013. All of this matters, because it shows that the UK was one of the first countries to adopt and implement the convention and was swift to dispose of the stocks it held.
Why are cluster munitions so controversial? Why is this specific type of bomb banned by a special international agreement? Because the sub-munitions are scattered over a wide area, they are difficult to track and can find their way into civilian areas. Moreover, the fail rate—the number of sub-munitions which don’t explode on impact with the ground—can vary between two per cent and 40 per cent; those that don’t explode remain a danger to civilians for months or years afterwards. So while they are designed to attack targets like runways, groups of vehicles or dispersed personnel, they can cause considerable collateral damage over a long period: the US stopped bombing Laos in 1973, but civilians were still being killed and injured by unexploded sub-munitions in 2009.
It was a rational and humane decision to take these nasty weapons off the table: if nobody uses them, after all, no-one has an advantage. That was the motivation behind the Convention on Cluster Munitions. However, while 123 states have signed the convention, there are some notable exceptions including China and Brazil. More pertinently, the convention has not been adopted by the United States, Russia or Ukraine.
On Friday 7 July, the US announced that it would supply cluster munitions to Ukraine. This infringes no international agreements, since neither country is a party to the convention, but it still raised eyebrows. The US national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, told the media that American officials “recognise that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm”, but stressed that the Ukraine military was running dangerously low on ammunition, and needed a “bridge of supplies”. Keeping Ukraine equipped is the most important consideration. Sullivan concluded, “We will not leave Ukraine defenceless at any point in this conflict period”. But we need to give credit where it’s due: it is clear that the US administration has not taken this controversial step lightly. President Joe Biden told CNN that it had been a “very difficult decision” and that he had taken some time to be persuaded of its necessity, but the simple truth was that “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition”. He also revealed that he had discussed the issue with allies before coming to a conclusion.
Naturally, this is a propaganda gift for Russia (even though both sides in the war in Ukraine have already used cluster munitions). A spokesman for the defence ministry described it as an act of desperation by the US, and called it “evidence of impotence in the face of the failure of the much publicised Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’”. This is a neat approach: Moscow cannot condemn the use of these weapons themselves, but can say that the US is being forced to take decisions with which it is not comfortable because the military situation is running against them. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Biden for the package of military aid worth $800 million, which, he tweeted, will “bring Ukraine closer to victory over the enemy”, while the Ukrainian defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, promised that cluster munitions would not be used in civilian areas but only to break particularly tough sections of the Russian line as Ukraine continues its counter-offensive.
US allies have given a mixed response. The Spanish defence minister, Margarita Robles, expressed opposition, saying simply “No to cluster bombs and yes to the legitimate defence of Ukraine”. However, a spokesman for the government of Germany was more emollient and sympathetic: “We’re certain that our US friends didn’t take the decision about supplying such ammunition lightly”. Both Spain and Germany are signatories to the convention. Many human rights groups have also condemned the decision by President Biden.
The UK government is in a difficult position. In our pursuit of a chimerical fulfilment of the “special relationship”, successive governments have tried to be one of the US’s closest and most reliable allies. It was in pursuit of this kind of bond that Sir Tony Blair promised unquestioning support over Iraq to President George W. Bush in 2002: “I will be with you, whatever,” the prime minister wrote. Relations with the US have been somewhat strained since President Biden took office in 2021, and Rishi Sunak wants to cut a dash on the world stage as the superpower’s friend. Speaking to reporters yesterday, the prime minister reiterated that the UK was a signatory to the convention, and “discourages” the use of cluster munitions. However, he tried to position himself as fully behind the cause of Ukraine and differing only on one small point of detail.
We will continue to do our part to support Ukraine against Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion, but we’ve done that by providing heavy battle tanks and most recently long-range weapons, and hopefully all countries can continue to support Ukraine… Russia’s act of barbarism is causing untold suffering to millions of people.
That last phrase was a clever effort to refocus the debate on the wider issue of Ukraine, which is relatively clear-cut in terms of right and wrong, and away from the messy business of weapons of war.
It is worth saying at this point that the UK is the second-largest supplier of military equipment and support to Ukraine, behind only the United States. We have provided materiel worth £4.6 billion since the Russian invasion in February 2022, an extraordinary array of items from air defence systems and artillery pieces to Javelin, Brimstone and NLAW anti-tank missiles and Challenger 2 main battle tanks. Among those supplies have been around 100,000 rounds of ammunition for various artillery pieces. We have also undertaken the training for thousands of Ukrainian service personnel, not only in combat skills but also medical procedures and the laws of conflict.
This policy has been popular. Around two-thirds of the British public approve of President Zelenskyy, with women and members of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) particularly in favour. Three-quarters of the population are invested in the conflict, in the sense of having a preference as to who emerges as the winner (overwhelmingly Ukraine, at 81 per cent, against three per cent for Russia), and 71 per cent of those surveyed think we should either maintain or increase our military support for Ukraine, and only 11 per cent want us to reduce the level of support. While noting that British troops are not actively participating in the war in Ukraine, these approval levels are a far cry from our recent deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rishi Sunak has clearly done the right thing in putting on the record an acknowledgement of our obligations under the Convention on Cluster Munitions and highlighting the wider context of the conflict, without heavily criticising the US for its decision to supply the weapons to Ukraine. Tobias Ellwood MP, chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, has been more vocal, calling for the US to rethink its strategy. He called it the “wrong call and will alienate international goodwill”. Ellwood, a former minister and regular officer in the Royal Green Jackets and now a lieutenant-colonel in the Army Reserve, may have a point, though he also has a tendency to speak his mind without always calculating the ramifications. The West is solidly behind Ukraine at the moment, but if the war continues without an obvious change in the fortunes of the combatants, and if fatigue sets in among the public, the smallest thing could make a difference and the US supply of cluster munitions could be awkward. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how else the prime minister could have dealt with Friday’s announcement by the White House. It is, however, refreshing to see the government committing wholeheartedly and without reservation to its obligations under international law.
The more fundamental question than the UK response, obviously, is whether the US has done the right thing. We shouldn’t read too much into the fact that America has not signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions; the US is extremely sensitive about its freedom of action and very strongly opposes international legal constraints on its action. For example, it is not a signatory to the Rome Convention which established the International Criminal Court, at which the US remains only an observer; it signed but did not ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change; it signed but did not ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and it did not sign the UN Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons. So it has form.
Nevertheless, President Biden made a policy decision, a choice to supply these widely condemned weapons to Ukraine, where they will be used in the counter-offensive against Russia and we can only hope that the Ukrainian armed forces observe their self-denying ordinance about their use. But we need to be realistic. Cluster munitions are brutal weapons of war, and the chances of not a single civilian being injured, given that the sub-munitions can remain live for decades, are extremely slim. So the coalition supporting Ukraine, but in particular Ukraine itself and the United States, must be prepared for the day, whether it’s next week or in a decade, that heart-rending pictures of a child killed or maimed by a US-supplied, Ukraine-deployed bomblet are beamed around the world. That needs to be taken on the chin, and a sober, responsible but explanatory response prepared in advance.
I’m inclined to give the White House a little room for manoeuvre here. I would rather we didn’t use cluster bombs in Ukraine, even if the Russians have used them with impunity and without regard for the consequences, and will continue to do so. It is only one of the breaches of laws and conventions of war that Russian soldiers have committed (for more, see the excellent Byline TV-funded documentary The Eastern Front by veteran war correspondent John Sweeney and director Caolan Robertson, which has amassed a wealth of detail on the subject). But we have to balance our moral preferences against objective reality.
The invasion of Ukraine has been the first major state-on-state conflict in Europe since 1945. The wars in the Balkans in the 1990s, while brutal and bloody, involved non-recognised states, militias and so on, and were much more intimate, horribly so, in their scale. So everyone is learning lessons from this war, and one of them which seems to have caught us by surprise is that this kind of clash, with artillery playing a prominent role, uses up ammunition extremely quickly. Ukrainian forces are firing thousands of rounds each day, while the US has a target of manufacturing 90,000 rounds a month, but that target will not be reached until 2024 or 2025. This is an obvious mismatch: the West has all but exhausted its stockpiles of compatible ammunition, and there are desperate attempts to find new supplies. The UK has even commissioned a covert unit to buy up ex-Soviet calibre ammunition, the kind which Ukraine relies on most, from around the markets of Europe.
The simple truth is that military planners did not foresee the reliance on artillery that future conflicts might bring. Parts of the front in Ukraine have settled into entrenched positions eerily reminiscent of the First World War, making guns, howitzers and mortars for the moment the main weapons of war, and we just did not have the stockpiles available to support this nature of conflict. Ukrainian units are having to ration their ammunition strictly, which is a tactical constraint they could do without, and it may well be one of the reasons the counter-offensive which began last month has not proceeded as swiftly as some had hoped.
I don’t know and can’t know the details of Ukrainian logistics and levels of supply. But if Washington has decided to supply cluster munitions because it feels it is the only way to keep the offensive moving, then that is at least understandable. I assume—perhaps this is an assumption too far—that the US would rather not have included cluster bombs in the package of military support. But it is also possible that the stark, bloody logic of military advantage has won out over a broader consideration embracing legal and humanitarian risks. After all, generals do sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture in pursuit of the sanguinary metrics of warfare, as anyone who has studied the Vietnam War will know.
Let us hope that President Biden is concealing a degree of force majeure in this decision, Let us hope that the Ukrainian armed forces abide by their promise not to use cluster munitions near civilian targets. And let us hope, above all, that the West and Ukraine together find a sustainable and swift solution to the shell crisis which is forcing everyone’s hands.