The U.S. will provide Ukraine with cluster munitions as part of a new $800 million weapons aid package announced last Friday.
Officials said the dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM) will provide a critical capability for Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive operation and serve as a “bridge” while the U.S. and its allies and partners continue to ramp up capacity for production of artillery rounds.
“With this announcement, we will be able to provide Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of additional artillery ammunition immediately. This decision will ensure we can sustain our support for Ukraine by bridging us to a point where we are producing sufficient artillery ammunition on a monthly basis across the coalition,” Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, said at a Pentagon press briefing on Friday.
The announcement of the U.S.’ decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions, which are banned by more than 100 countries, follows the Pentagon’s confirmation on Thursday it would only provide newer variants of the weapon with dud rates below 2.35 percent (Defense Daily, July 6).
Providing DPICMs with a dud rate above one percent, which accounts for the average percentage of bomblets in the weapon that fail to explode, requires a waiver to bypass existing congressional restrictions.
“This was a decision that took us a long time to come to. And all the concerns that people have raised — the humanitarian concerns, what the reactions of allies and partners would be, what the reaction would be on the Hill — all of these things were debated and adjudicated within the interagency,” Kahl said. “We are not breaking the law. First of all, with the prohibition against exporting [cluster munitions with a dud rate] above one percent — these munitions are pretty close to one percent but they are not at the one percent level — the president does have the authority to waive that requirement on national security grounds, and that’s what he has done in this instance.”
Kahl said the cluster munitions will “ensure Ukraine has sufficient artillery ammunition for many months to come,” and declined to detail when they could arrive but that it would be on a “timeframe that is relevant for the counteroffensive.”
“In this period, the United States and our allies and partners will continue to ramp up our defense industrial bases to support Ukraine,” Kahl said. “Because things are going a little slower [with Ukraine’s counteroffensive] than some had hoped, there are very high expenditures of artillery rates. So this is to make sure the Ukrainians have the confidence that they have what they need, but frankly also that the Russians know that the Ukrainians are going to stay in the game.”
Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters on Thursday the DPICMs will offer Ukraine an “anti-armor and anti-personnel capability.”
Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security advisor, said on Friday that Russia has been using cluster munitions since the start of the war with high dud rates “between 30 and 40 percent.”
“Ukraine has committed to post-conflict demining efforts to mitigate any potential harm to civilians, and this will be necessary regardless of whether the United States provides these munitions or not because of Russia’s widespread use of cluster munitions. We will have to continue to assist Ukraine with demining efforts no matter what given the significant use of cluster munitions already perpetrated by Russia,” Sullivan said. “We recognize that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance. This is why we’ve deferred the decision for as long as we could. But there is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians because Ukraine does not have enough artillery. That is intolerable to us.”
The new $800 million weapons aid package, the 42nd to be compiled of capabilities drawn from existing Pentagon inventories, also includes providing Ukraine with more munitions for RTX [RTX]-built Patriot air defense systems and Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] HIMARS launchers.
Along with the DPICMs, Ukraine will also receive 31 more 155mm howitzers as well as more 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds.
The package also includes AIM-7 and TOW missiles, more Stinger and Javelin missiles, precision aerial munitions, Edge Autonomy’s Penguin drones and more Bradley and Stryker vehicles.