The United States will provide cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of a new military aid package for its war effort against Russia, the Pentagon announced on Friday.
The controversial munitions, also known as Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munition (DPICM), are part of an $800 million package that also includes ammunition for Patriot air defense systems and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other military aid.
"With this announcement, we will be able to provide Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of additional artillery ammunition immediately," Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said at a Pentagon briefing on Friday. "This decision will ensure we can sustain our support for Ukraine by bringing us to a point where we are producing sufficient artillery ammunition on a monthly basis across the coalition."
"By providing Ukraine with DPCM artillery ammunition, we will ensure that the Ukrainian military has sufficient artillery ammunition for many months to come," he later added. "In this period, the United States our allies and partners will continue to ramp up our defense industrial bases to support Ukraine for the past year and a half. President Biden has been clear that we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes."
At a White House briefing earlier Friday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said these munitions would be a "bridge" for Ukraine until more conventional weapons become available for the country to repel Moscow's invasion.
"This is the moment to begin the construction of that bridge so that there isn’t any period over the summer or heading into this fall when Ukraine is short on artillery," Sullivan said, adding that "being short on artillery" makes the country's forces "vulnerable to Russian counterattacks that could subjugate more Ukrainian civilians."
Kahl similarly pointed out that while Russia has used such munitions "indiscriminately" since the invasion began, Ukraine requested the cluster bombs "in order to defend its own sovereign territory."
The decision comes despite widespread concerns that the controversial bombs can cause civilian casualties. The Pentagon will provide munitions that have an "extremely low" failure rate, also known as a "dud rate," meaning there will be far fewer unexploded rounds that can result in unintended civilian deaths.
"The DPICM ammunition we are delivering to Ukraine will consist only of those with a dud rate less than 2.35%," said Kahl. "Compare that to Russia, which has been using cluster munitions across Ukraine with 'dud rates' of between 30 and 40%. During the first year of the conflict alone, Russia fired cluster munitions deployed from a range of weapon systems have likely expended tens of millions of submunitions, or bomblets, across Ukraine."
"Ukraine would not be using these munitions in some foreign land," Sullivan noted. "This is their country they’re defending. These are their citizens they’re protecting and they are motivated to use any weapon system they have in a way that minimizes risks to those citizens."
Kahl also noted that Ukraine has committed to not using cluster bombs "in civilian populated urban environments" and pledged to record where they're used in order to "simplify demining efforts."
"The United States has already invested more than $95 million in Ukraine's demining activities, and we will provide more support to help Ukraine mitigate the impacts of cluster munition use by both sides in this conflict," he added.
"Ukraine's fight is a marathon not a sprint," Kahl said. "So we will continue to provide Ukraine with the urgent capabilities that it needs to meet the moment as well as what it needs to keep itself secure for the long term from Russian aggression."
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.
Ukrainian officials have asked for the weapons to aid their campaign to push through lines of Russian troops and make gains in the ongoing counteroffensive. Russian forces are already using cluster munitions on the battlefield and in populated civilian areas, U.S. officials have said.
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% in some cases. U.S. officials said Thursday that the rate of unexploded ordnance for the munitions that will be going to Ukraine is less than 3% and therefore will mean fewer threats left behind to civilians.
Asked how the cluster munitions, if approved, would help Ukraine, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a briefing Thursday they can be loaded with charges that can penetrate armor and fragment so they can hit multiple personnel — “a capability that would be useful in any type of offensive operations.“ Ryder said the Russians have been using cluster munitions that have a very high dud rate.
Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of Ukraine’s parliament who has been advocating that Washington send more weapons, noted that Ukrainian forces have had to disable mines from much of the territory they are winning back from Russia. As part of that process, Ukrainians will also be able to catch any unexploded ordnance from cluster munitions.
“We will have to de-mine anyway, but it’s better to have this capability,” Ustinova said.
She credited Congress for pushing the administration over several months to change its position on the munitions.
Republicans largely cheered the decision, while progressive Democrats voiced their opposition to sending over those kind of munitions.
"For Ukrainian forces to defeat Putin’s invasion, Ukraine needs at least equal access to the weapons Russia already uses against them, like cluster munitions," Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said in a statement in a rare show of support for a Biden policy. "Providing this new capability is the right decision — even if it took too long."
Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the move was long overdue.
“Now is the time for the U.S. and its allies to provide Ukraine with the systems it needs from cluster munitions to F-16s to ATACMS in order to aid their critical counteroffensive. Any further delay will cost the lives of countless Ukrainians and prolong this brutal war,” said McCaul, R-Texas.
"I've been very vocal about providing Ukraine the resources and weapon systems they need to defend themselves and their sovereignty against Russia's invasion," said Pennsylvania Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Democratic lawmaker and an Air Force veteran. "But I strongly oppose the Administration's decision to provide cluster munitions."
"Cluster munitions can be indiscriminate and have the potential to harm civilians years after conflicts have ended," she wrote in a Twitter thread, adding: "I challenge the notion that we should employ the same tactics Russia is using. And I challenge all of us to remember that this war will end, and the broken pieces of Ukraine will need to be rebuilt. History remembers not only who wins a war but also how a war is won."
The Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, would give Ukraine the ability to strike Russian targets from as far as about 180 miles.
Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the U.S. has been thinking about providing the cluster munitions “for a long time.”
“The Ukrainians have asked for it, other European countries have provided some of that, the Russians are using it,” Milley said during a speech at the National Press Club.
Cluster bombs can be fired by artillery that the U.S. has provided to Ukraine, and the Pentagon has a large stockpile of them.
The last large-scale American use of cluster bombs was during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to the Pentagon. But U.S. forces considered them a key weapon during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to Human Rights Watch. In the first three years of that conflict, it is estimated the U.S.-led coalition dropped more than 1,500 cluster bombs in Afghanistan.
Proponents of banning cluster bombs say they kill indiscriminately and endanger civilians long after their use. Groups have raised alarms about Russia’s use of the munitions in Ukraine.
A convention banning the use of cluster bombs has been joined by more than 120 countries who agreed not to use, produce, transfer or stockpile the weapons and to clear them after they’ve been used.
The United States, Russia and Ukraine are among the countries that have not signed on.
It is not clear how America’s NATO allies would view the U.S. providing cluster bombs to Ukraine and whether the issue might prove divisive for their largely united support of Kyiv. More than two-thirds of the 30 countries in the alliance are signatories of the 2010 convention on cluster munitions.
Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary of defense focusing on Russia and Ukraine, recently testified to Congress that the Pentagon has assessed that such munitions would help Kyiv press through Russia’s dug-in positions.