The Biden administration has decided to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine and is expected to announce that the Pentagon will send thousands as part of a new military aid package worth up to $US800 million for the war effort against Russia.
The Biden administration has decided to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine and is expected to announce that the Pentagon will send thousands as part of a new military aid package worth up to $US800 million for the war effort against Russia, according to people familiar with the decision.
Long sought by Ukraine, cluster bombs are weapons that open in the air, releasing submunitions, or “bomblets,” that are dispersed over a large area and are intended to wreak destruction on multiple targets at once. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, some cluster munitions leave behind “bomblets” that have a high rate of failure to explode — up to 40 per cent in some cases. US officials said on Thursday that the rate of unexploded ordnance for the munitions that will be going to Ukraine is less than 3 per cent and therefore will mean fewer threats left behind to civilians.
If the decision was made to provide the munitions to Ukraine, he said the US “would be carefully selecting bombs with lower dud rates, for which we have recent testing data.”Asked how the cluster munitions, if approved, would help Ukraine, Ryder said they can be loaded with charges that can penetrate armour and fragment so they can hit multiple personnel - “a capability that would be useful in any type of offensive operations.
Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the US has been thinking about providing the cluster munitions “for a long time.”
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