Cluster weapons - military utility and alternatives

This report is made through the sponsorship of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its purpose is to get an overview of the military utility of cluster munitions, and to find to which degree their capacity can be substituted by current conventional weapons or weapons that are on the verge of becoming available. Cluster munition roughly serve three purposes; firstly to defeat soft targets, i e personnel; secondly to defeat armoured of light armoured vehicles; and thirdly to contribute to the suppressive effect, i e to avoid enemy forces to use their weapons without inflicting too much damage upon them. The report seeks to quantify the effect of such munitions and to compare this effect with that of conventional weapons and more modern weapons. The report discusses in some detail how such weapons work and which effect they have against different targets. The fragment effect is the most important one. Other effects are the armour piercing effect, the blast effect, and the incendiary effect. Quantitative descriptions of such effects are usually only found in classified literature. However, this report is exclusively based on unclassified sources. The availability of such sources has been sufficient to get an adequate picture of the effect of such weapons. The calculations show that many of the cluster weapons have a more modest effect than usually assumed. Cluster weapons do have a satisfactory or adequate effect against most targets. Under certain conditions the effect is quite good. However, no evidence has been found to claim that such weapons are far better than their alternatives to the extent that they indispensable. A quite common type of cluster munitions is the so-called DPICM (Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition) that was used extensively in Lebanon in 2006. The bomblets of this kind is characterized as being small, they detonate at the ground surface, they a limited amount of explosive, and their basic design is such that they eject their fragments almost parallel to the ground of even downwards. Thus their range is limited. Only a few fragments are effective at distance from the bomblet impact point. Compared with conventional high explosive munition, like the M107 artillery projectile, the effect of cluster munition is up to 50% better against soft targets. Modern high explosive is however claimed to be 30% better than M107. Thus the gap between cluster munitions and unitary high explosives may become quite narrow. When cluster munitions were introduced they constituted the only viable way to defeat armoured targets at long distance in an indirect mode. In the meantime armoured vehicle have been fitted with kits that limit the effect of small bomblets, rendering cluster weapons less effective against such targets. Additionally, the so-called sensor fuzed warheads (SFW) have become available. A mixture unitary conventional high explosive munitions and SFW’s will be a far better choice than cluster weapons. Even though SFW’s are very expensive, their effect is so superior that their use is cost effective in comparison to cluster munitions.