The Defense News opinion piece of 10 Aug. by John Nagl and Daniel Rice ignores the historical experience of cluster munition use while calling on the 23 NATO states currently party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) to withdraw and resume production of these horrific weapons.
To do so would irreparably damage the credibility of these countries, set back decades of progress towards better legal protection of civilians in armed conflict and betray the commitment to a rules-based international order which NATO countries and many others seek to defend, including in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict.
What is particularly unfortunate is that the authors argue for such a dramatic reversal without providing a facts-based analysis of the military effectiveness of cluster munitions, either historically or in the Ukraine conflict.
States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions banned such weapons both because of the unacceptable harm they consistently inflict on civilians and due to the inaccuracy, unreliability, and limited military effectiveness of these antiquated area weapons. They are, in effect, a crude weapon of the Cold War period with most existing stocks approaching or past their intended period of use.
Since their peak production period during the Cold War, a wide array of more accurate and reliable weapons has become available . While a weapon that can spread 600-700 submunitions over thousands of square meters represents impressive destructive capacity, the reality is that most of these submunitions don’t hit anything. The UK Defense Ministry’s June 2000 report “Kosovo: Lessons from the Crisis” concluded that tens of thousands of British cluster submunitions had destroyed only a few dozen military objects and that “it would have been useful to have a capability to strike single vehicles more accurately,”
Similarly, a Dutch military representative in an April 2024 meeting in Oslo on explosive weapons stated that the Netherlands no longer has cluster munitions or other area weapons because it prefers munitions that will hit their targets directly.
A U.S. General Accounting Office report on the 1991 Gulf War concluded that cluster munitions significantly impeded military operations and “in some cases ground movement came to a halt because ground units were afraid of encountering unexploded ordnance.” In addition, they also killed or injured 100 US soldiers and another 100 clearance workers.
Following the 2003 Gulf War a “lessons learned” report by the U.S. Third Infantry Division, cited by Human Rights Watch, included cluster munitions among the “losers” of the war, asking pointedly, “Is the DPICM (cluster munition) a Cold War relic?” and reporting that commanders were “hesitant to use it” but “had to” in the absence of alternative weapons.
What is beyond a doubt is that the historically high failure rates of cluster munitions, from 5% to 40% depending on the model and age of munitions used, results in massive contamination for which civilians and their communities consistently pay the highest price. This lethal contamination is a result of the incredibly complex design of the munitions, deployment in the heat of battle at altitudes and airspeeds inconsistent with the design, and the decades-old age of most cluster munitions in existing stockpiles.
Failure rates are consistently higher than manufacturers claim, often due to the difference between failures under ideal testing conditions and those in the real world. In areas in which civilians and military are co-mingled, civilians inevitably are killed and injured due to the indiscriminate wide-area nature of cluster munitions.
Children, who are attracted by the small colorful canisters of unexploded submunitions, are common victims, along with civilians attempting to remove them to access the rubble of their homes, farmers attempting to remove them from their lands, and clearance personnel toiling for years to remove them from destroyed buildings, forests, hillsides, swamps, and agricultural areas.
According the 2023 Cluster Munition Monitor report, at least 95% of those killed or wounded by cluster munitions in 2022 were civilians, and children accounted for 71% of casualties from cluster munition remnants where the age was known.
The authors of the Defense News article not only welcome Lithuania’s regrettable decision in July 2024 to withdraw from the CCM but also call on NATO countries to resume production of cluster munitions. Such new production would be inconsistent with U.S. Defense Secretary Austin’s assurance in July 2023 that U.S. cluster munition transfers to Ukraine were but a “bridging capability” until production of other (presumably less objectionable) weapons picks up.
Do the authors really want to redirect European arms production away from more modern weapons to production of weapons that have been labelled a “Cold War relic”? In considering the authors’ misguided call for NATO States Party to the CCM to withdraw, European states should reflect long and hard about the grave implications of any such decision for the fabric of international humanitarian law, a body of norms built up over generations out of the rubble of the Second World War to better protect both civilians and combatants.
Despite hundreds of armed conflicts in past decades, no state has withdrawn from any of the key global treaties banning an entire category of weapons, from the landmark 1949 Geneva Conventions or their 1977 Additional Protocols. Respect for these norms has collectively prevented untold suffering in conflicts of past decades. A call to effectively dismantle any one of these conventions is unconscionable.
Heeding this call would also be a victory for Russia, further undermining the rule of law and creating dissent among NATO allies. Now is the time to recommit to the protection of civilians in armed conflict, not undermine it.
We therefore call on NATO States party to the CCM to deplore Lithuania’s decision to withdraw.
They must take the opportunity of the September 10-14 meeting of CCM States Parties in Geneva to call on Lithuania to suspend its withdrawal process and engage in dialogue with other States Parties, the International Committee of the Red Cross and civil society about the historic failure of cluster munitions and their unacceptable humanitarian impacts that led to the Convention in the first place.
Peter Herby is the head of Petersburg Partnerships, a consultancy on arms-related humanitarian issues based in Geneva. Previously he was head of the Arms Unit for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, 1997-2012). In this capacity Herby played an instrumental role in public advocacy on cluster munitions from 2001 and led the ICRC’s team that negotiated the CCM in Dublin in 2008.
Tamar Gabelnick is Director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines – Cluster Munition Coalition (ICBL-CMC), a global civil society coalition seeking an end the suffering caused by landmines and cluster munitions. Previously she was Policy Director of ICBL-CMC (2005-2015), where she participated in the negotiations of the Convention on Cluster Munitions and led the coalition’ global advocacy work on convention implementation.
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