- The US decided last week to send deadly but controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine's military.
- Experts and officials say these explosives will help ease Ukraine's ammunition shortages.
Ukrainian forces, at times outgunned by their Russian foes, are fast burning through ammunition during intense artillery duels. But the deadly, albeit controversial, cluster munitions inbound to Kyiv will help alleviate the strain on its dwindling stockpiles, as well as those of its supporters, US officials and experts say.
The Biden administration announced last week that it will send cluster munitions — specifically 155 millimeter artillery shells also called dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs) — to Ukraine as part of a new $800 million security assistance package.
By providing DPICMs, "we will ensure that the Ukrainian military has sufficient artillery ammunition for many months to come," a senior Pentagon official said in revealing the new lethal aid.
These ground-launched munitions break apart in mid-air and scatter dozens of smaller explosives over a large area, threatening to deal damage, significantly more than a regular artillery shell, across the many layers of defenses and fortifications Russian troops built behind the front lines in anticipation of Ukraine's ongoing counteroffensive in the occupied eastern and southern regions.
Kyiv has long pressured the US to provide it with cluster munitions, the usage of which has historically triggered widespread international concern due to what observers note is an unacceptably high dud rate — meaning the dispersed bomblets sometimes fail to detonate and can pose a risk to civilians long after fighting comes to an end.
Though Moscow denies doing so, Russian forces have used cluster munitions in combat since the early days of the war, harming civilians in the process. US officials meanwhile, have said that American DPICMs have a dud rate far lower than that of Moscow's munitions — 2.35% compared to 30-40% — and added that Kyiv assured it will minimize using the explosives near civilian areas.
But US officials have also defended the decision to outfit Ukraine with cluster munitions by arguing that they will help soothe what White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called "dramatically high expenditure rates" of ammunition by Kyiv.
"We base our security assistance decision on Ukraine's needs on the ground, and Ukraine needs artillery to sustain its offensive and defensive operations," Sullivan told reporters at a briefing on Friday. "Artillery is at the core of this conflict. Ukraine is firing thousands of rounds a day to defend against Russian efforts to advance and also to support its own efforts to retake its sovereign territory."
Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, said that because Ukraine's counteroffensive is moving at a slower pace than many people had anticipated, thanks to Russia's hardened defensive lines, it forces a higher rate of artillery fire. In turn, Washington needed to ensure that Kyiv had a sufficient ammunition stockpile.
"We're confident that with this inflow of DPICM, in combination with the unitary 155 rounds, we continue to provide that the Ukrainians will be able to sustain the artillery fight for the foreseeable future," Kahl said on Friday, adding it's an important signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he "can't just outlast the Ukrainians."
The provision of cluster munitions is also aimed at preserving US stockpiles. "This is a war relating to munitions. And they're running out of that ammunition, and we're low on it," President Joe Biden said of Ukrainian and US stockpiles in a recent interview with CNN in which he justified his decision.
"But the main thing is they either have the weapons to stop the Russians now – keep them from stopping the Ukrainian offensive through these areas – or they don't. And I think they needed them," he said.
There are several specific ways that cluster munitions can help conserve Ukraine's artillery ammunition, maximize efficiency to sustain offensive operations, and ease demand on NATO countries as they struggle with their respective domestic shell production.
Conventional 155 milimeter rounds when fired at Russian defenses, like trenches, are unlikely to pose a major threat to Moscow's troops unless they achieve a direct hit, and even then, they still don't spread shrapnel very far, wrote Jack Watling and Justin Bronk, two military research fellows at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, in commentary published this week.
Cluster munitions, by contrast, disperse bomblets over a large area which increases the risk to Russian troops on the ground, Watling and Bronk said. Ukraine will end up needing to fire fewer cluster munition rounds to achieve a desired battlefield result, they added, meaning Kyiv can ease the burden on its howitzers, elongate their barrel lives, and fight the Russians for longer.
DPICMs will also shore up the availability of other unused munitions in Ukraine's inventory, therefore slowing ammunition depletion as NATO attempts to meet production demand, Watling and Bronk noted. With the Russians dug into their defensive fortifications and no end in sight to the 16-month-long war, this may be critical to preventing fatigue in Kyiv's military and its Western backers.
Washington's difficult decision to outfit Kyiv with cluster munitions appears to have come at a calculated and pivotal moment. Ukrainian forces have made small territorial gains during their ongoing counteroffensive, but they are painstakingly working to penetrate elaborate and deadly defensive networks along Russian lines.
"The hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told MSNBC at the NATO summit in Lithuania this week. "If we didn't do it, we don't do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, then they will be defenseless."