You know what’s controversial? Bombing hospitals, schools and residential buildings.
You know what’s controversial? Blowing up a dam that destroys an entire region of the country.
You know what’s controversial? Keeping a nuclear power plant as hostage.
You know what’s controversial? Abducting children and taking them against their will to another country.
You know what’s controversial? Torture and mutilation of soldiers defending their home land.
Whoever says or implies at this late stage of russian atrocities that cluster bombs for Ukraine are “controversial” - fuck yourself gently with a rusted chainsaw.
EDIT: typo (half the time I try and type “of”, it comes out as “if”)
Those things being evil does not make cluster bombs less evil.
Those things being evil does not make cluster bombs less evil.
Russia approves using cluster bombs, so it’s fine to use them against Russia.
I disagree. The trouble with cluster bombs (as with landmines) is that they are indiscriminate killers. Sure, they may kill some Russian soldiers now, but the ones that don’t explode (a huge minority of them) will remain in the ground until an innocent Ukrainian child gets blown up years from now.
It’s fine to cheer on the ‘killing Russian soldiers’ part, but when it comes to cluster bombs that comes hand in hand with ‘killing innocent civilians, years after the conflict ends’, which is less okay.
Unlike the lifetime’s worth of land mines that are already there? It’s a drop in the water at this point, and I think Ukraine has the right to decide whether or not they use them on their own territory, especially considering the other option may very well be allowing Russians to come kill the civilian population with cluster munitions, something they are already actively doing.
soviet era cluster ammunition is already in use, and the more firepower ukrainians get now the less uxo from russian artillery remains in their land after the war
also ukrainians asked for cluster ammunition for the longest time, so they made the decision with full understanding of consequences (they were manufacturers and users of cluster ammunition for a long time)
I think that these newer cluster munitions deactivate after a set period.
I would ve against using this weapon, if the Russians had not already used them extensively. Clearing out all of the unexploded ones is going to take decades…
Still, glad to see the political will to support Ukraine is still there!
Mine roller is gonna be a popular tractor attachment for Ukrainian farmers
I hate war but the Ukrainians deserve support defending themselves.
at last. these are very useful tool, with which Ukrainians are already familiar with and even had some limited domestic production of
While it may have its military use, this type of munition will main and kill Ukrainian children for decades after the war.
Found this in another forum, seems relevant.
The weapon involved is the CBU-97 Sensor-Fused Weapon, which was designed to stop invading Soviet tank columns and was used a handful of times in the invasion of Iraq. It is a winged, unpowered canister that is designed to attack enemy vehicles by flying low over them and ejecting ten sub-munitions.
The sub-munitions each have small parachutes and infrared sensors that detect enemy vehicles and launch four small hockey puck shaped charges that explode immediately above the top of their targets. In effect, with a single CBU-97, a large area can be attacked so as to destroy most or all of enemy vehicle targets in an area of about fifteen acres.
So, what is so bad about the CBU-97? Cluster bombs are controversial because the Soviets used to drop them on Afghan civilians, often with the small bomblets made to look like toys so as to attack children. Otherwise, made to be hard to detect, the Soviet bomblets acted like small mines and could linger for years so as to make Afghan trails and agricultural fields too dangerous to use.
The CBU-97 is not such a weapon, but in reputation it suffers from the controversy over cluster bombs. And yes, I see little reason not to supply it to Ukraine. In effect, the Ukrainians could use them to clear large swaths of the battle space of Russian tanks and other fighting vehicles.
This is the good stuff, two devices like this can stop entire eastern armored division. Also it’s a air dropped bomb, which means it requires air superiority. It’s also massive a overkill against 1 or 2 tanks, or an APC - there are few massive concentrations of armor that would warrant use of CBU-97, except for Kyiv convoy and such, but it’s unlikely to repeat. The thing you need for this is either 155mm DPICM, or 155mm BONUS, which has two elements like in CBU-97 per round
I’m guessing the cluster weapons discussed are mostly tube artillery projectiles, like 155mm and maybe M30/M26 rockets, because ZSU is artillery-heavy
Source? I was under the impression that our cluster munitions came with a timed fuse where they would self destruct if they didn’t find a target after a certain amount of time.
I think if you check the wikipedia page or just google for CBU-97 you’ll find a wealth of info. More than I can summarize here, but it’s far from being a dumb bomb on a timer.
That goes for any unexploded ordnance, we are still cleaning up regular unexploded shells from World War 1 more than 100 years after the fact and every now and then it still claims a victim.
It sucks, but you have to offset that against the benefit. The longer the Russians occupy parts of Ukraine, the more atrocities they are able to commit against civilians (cf. Bucha, Irpin, Izium, Kherson,…). Also when people talk about the civilian casualties, they always forget that the bulk of the Ukrainian soldiers were civilians just over a year ago, and they would love nothing more than to return to a peaceful civilian life. Their lives are valuable as well and should be protected too.
If cluster munitions helps them to get rid of the Russians faster and with a lot less casualties, it is a trade off we should make.
Jeez this war is so deadly.
So what’s the exact advantage of a cluster munition in this circumstance?
cluster munitions cover way bigger area. this makes a difference in several ways:
- you don’t need to haul as many shells to the frontline in the first place, making entire logistics easier
- you don’t wear out barrels as much, which makes artillery work for longer time
- you cover entire area at once, taking enemy by surprise and denying them time needed to go for cover
- submunitions are DPICM, which means that if a vehicle is hit from above by it, it can be penetrated (yes, even tanks) unless covered in ERA or such. in contrast, you need direct hit or almost direct hit of unitary projectile to disable armoured vehicle
- it’s not one big boom, it’s lots of small booms, which means that some bomblets will fall into trenches. unitary airburst shells offer similar capability, but these are rather uncommon for some reason
disadvantage is price, but also small size of each bomblet. because of small size and need to manufacture them in vastly higher numbers there are some limitations of fuzing mechanism that make it fail more often than your everyday unitary artillery shell. this is known limitation that lead to withdrawal of cluster munitions in the first place, at least in some western countries, and also reason for development of M30A1 AW for GMLRS. this will be mitigated by humanitarian demining made easier to some degree by painting submuntions bright yellow.
one thing to note. cluster warheads are effective weapons, but have limitations. namely, western doctrine relies on rapid movement, and if you shell enemy positions with cluster artillery, you can’t safely advance before demining takes place, unless you are either advancing in armoured vehicles only or are willing to take these losses. this is the less shiny reason for putting cluster warheads out of production in the western militaries
Ukrainian drone operators are also using single submunitions, presumably from cluster bombs, as drone dropped ammunition (i’ve seen at least three separate videos of this). these things are well suited for this role and are used in vastly smaller numbers minimizing UXO issues in the future
replacements include things like M30A1 AW or airburst unitary artillery (esp M1130 and similar) against soft targets (like soldiers in the open and trucks) and SFW, BONUS and such smart weapons against armor. DPICM does both of these things at once
as usual shortcomings of DPICM can be solved by throwing money at the problem
Hey, thanks for writing this.
unitary airburst shells offer similar capability, but these are rather uncommon for some reason
Really? I thought that was the standard type of shell. Do the typical unitary shells detonate on impact with the ground, then?
Ukrainian drone operators are also using single submunitions, presumably from cluster bombs, as drone dropped ammunition (i’ve seen at least three separate videos of this). these things are well suited for this role and are used in vastly smaller numbers minimizing UXO issues in the future
Oh yeah, I hadn’t considered that. And seeing as some of these were at end of life anyway it actually makes sense as an alternative to an ordinary infantry grenade.
Really? I thought that was the standard type of shell. Do the typical unitary shells detonate on impact with the ground, then?
at least judging by most of combat footage i’ve seen, this is the most common case. consider however that “artillery” is a mix of everything between 60mm mortar and 155mm howitzer, and only some of these have airburst as a standard option. also consider that despite flashy public announcements everyone clears their magazines out of old kit, and this means mostly older type, PD fuzed ammunition. Albania for example sent chinese 81mm mortars, which means it could be from 70s or so, and it’s hardly an exception
cluster bomblets for drones make sense, because cluster bomblets are already designed to be dropped at relatively low speed, have fins or ribbon so that they hit target the right way, have appropriate size and weight, are DPICM so are both antitank and generate fragments, it just makes sense
grenades are probably one of the least resource intensive weapons to develop in this situation btw, and really, about everything that drone can lift was already used as drone dropped ammunition. hand grenades of all manufacturers including thermobaric, 30mm VOG-17, 40mm projected grenades, both western and eastern, RPG warheads, 60mm mortars, 81/82mm mortars, DPICM elements, at least few instances of 120mm mortar, and many, many custom made devices including 500ml fanta bottles
one launch, wider area, more damage, more dead orcs
It’s also more expensive (which I guess is our problem, not the Ukrainian’s) and if covering area is the goal normal high explosive shells work pretty well.
I’m pretty sure there’s more to say than that. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
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Okay, yeah, so definitely not an issue here.
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That’s helpful, thanks!
it’s also more expensive to dispose of iirc
That is why Ukraine can get it cheaply.
That’s definitely an issue too. In this case it will be the Ukrainians doing to cleanup too, at least.
