Banning Cluster Bombs: A Noble But Ultimately Futile Gesture?

dublin | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Monday May 19, 2008 10:55 by jim

Can there there be humanitarianism on the battlefield?

Cluster bombs come in many forms.
Cluster munitions can be delivered using artillery guns, long range rockets and ground attack aircraft.
The cluster munitions are often small bomblets often about the size of a hand grenade packed into large pod.
The pod breaks apart over the target, dispersing the bomblets which can shower an area the size of several football fields.
Their effects on civilians can be devastating.

The simulateous explosion of submunitions over a large area can kill hundreds of troops or destroy a column of enemy tanks or destroy rows of parked aircraft and crater concrete runways.
More modern versions of the weapons have individual guidance systems that can home in targets and destroy bunkers and armoured vehicles with shaped charges.
Many are preprogrammed to self-destruct after a number of hours or days.
But these new versions are expensive.
It is cheaper to produce submunitions that are unguided.
It is these bomblets that can often remain unexploded in the ground for years after the conflict creating a lethal hazard for civilians in the area.

That benefits of cluster munitions are that a force that uses them can minimise the cost to its own forces in repelling an enemy attack or launching an offensive against enemy forces.
Before cluster munitions were invented a massed infantry attack typical of the First World War could only be repelled by machine guns and concentrated heavy artillery and mortar bombardment. If an attacking force could throw enough men into an attack despite heavy casualties a human wave could reach the enemy lines overrun their trenches and make a breach.
To neutralise enemy infantry, tanks and columns of supply vehicles an artillery battery could only hit one target at a time or an aircraft with heavy calibre cannon or high explosives bombs would need to fly several sorties to destroy rows of tanks or trucks on a roadway.
To meet an enemy assault ground forces might be confronted by an enemy force that had pressed through the curtain of shrapnel of exploding shells and mortars and the fighting might degenerate into a hand to hand struggle in the trenches with bayonets and rifle butts with no possibility that air support could be used on intermingled friendly forces and enemy.

The logic of using cluster bombs was obvious.
If an enemy force could be annihilated with a single pass from an aircraft why not use them?

Landmines similarly reduce the cost in men needed to stop an enemy cold.
The most heavily mined border in the world divides North Korea from South Korea.
Hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops and their tanks would be badly mauled if they tried to cross the border an invade the South if they crossed these minefields. A smaller South Korean force could more easily repel or delay an attack before reserves were mustered to meet it.

The cost to civilians following the conflict are quite high.
Artillery shells, mortars and unexploded high explosive bombs are difficult enough to find and make safe.
But trying to locate and make safe hundreds if not thousands of unexploded bomblets sprinkled over hundreds of square miles is often unsurmountable. Areas can be made literally uninhabitable. But in agricultural societies people need to grow their crops to survive and the risk that your plow turning the soil may cost you your life is a daily fact of life.

In Croke Park a conference is being held to discuss a ban on cluster bombs among almost a hundred nations.
The reasoning goes that if the majority of the world decide that these weapons are inhumane that the major powers such as the US, China and Russia who continue to manufacture, stockpile and use them will be shamed into disgarding them too.

This is fundementally naive.

In the Middle Ages nobility who rode into battle on horseback clothed in suits of mail and plate armor and could sycthe through massed peasant foot soldiers slaying left and right with broadswords, maces and spiked balls on chains.
The inventions of the crossbow and long bow which enabled a lowly commor to unseat a Duke with a iron tipped arrow outraged the nobility. The English bowmen who were captured by the French often lost their index finger and second finger of their right hand.
The insulting two-finger gesture has its origin in this period when defeated French armies were jeered as they retired in defeat from the battlefield.

The invention of the musket meant that a force of a few hundred professional soldiers could break up a traditional front charge by swordsmen.

The aerodynamic bullet propelled from a rifled barrel meant that an soldier could hit his enemy at much longer ranges.
Lighter bullets and bolt action and later full automatic gas operated mechanisms meant that a single soldier could carry hundreds of rounds in his bandoliers and devastate his enemy at longer and longer ranges with increasing firepower.

The massed advancing squares of the Napoleonic Wars meant suicide a century later.

The French went into battle in the First World War wearing red trousers presenting excellent long range targets against the brown mud for German riflemen safe in their trenches.

No matter how bravely khaki clad British tommies charged at the German lines, a two man machine gun crew could literally wipe out an entire regiment in a matter of minutes.

The thicker the armour and the larger the gun of a tank and the faster they could pumped out by factories and thrown into the battle decided the battles of World War 2.
For decades the Red Army fielded millions of men armed with AK-47 rifles and tens of thousands of T-72 main battle tanks just behind the Iron Curtain. America could never hope to field the same numbers. If American troops were to survive they would need the support of overwhelming firepower. Every week in Vietnam, a battalion of US troops was helicoptered into a remote area to provoke an attack by an NVA force several times its size. American losses were often in the hundreds but Vietnamese losses consistently numbered in the thousands weekly. This was because of the huge air support provided. American troops would indentify their locations with coloured smoke allowing their jets to pound the enemy with napalm and cluster bombs. The few enemy that got through this curtain of fire were cut down at the perimeter by American rifles and machine guns. Without cluster bombs the US Army would likely have been annihilated by the human wave attacks of the NVA. At the end of the conflict US deaths numbered a mere 58,000 whereas Communists losses were in the millions. The fall of Saigon in 1975 was a hollow victory for the Communists, having lost a whole generation of young men not in glorious hand to hand combat but as hapless victims of exploding bomblets.

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam's army used the tactics of WW1.
The Republican Guard were dug into trenches, bunkers and pillboxes several miles deep straddling the American line of advance.
The Americans simply wiped out entire Iraqi units using cluster bombs. The intensity of the bombardment forced many Iraq troops to throw away their weapons and uniforms. American airpower was the crucial factor that the led to the collapse of the Iraqi Army and the three week advance into Baghdad. The adoption of insugent tactics by the Iraqis has been a direct result of the use of cluster bombs against convention military units. In November 2004 the success of the American assault when Iraqi insurgents tried to fight a conventional pitched battle was decided by the unrestricted use of cluster munitions which destroyed insurgent positions.
Iraqi actions have been limited to the use of IED's and sniper fire which has claimed a mere 4,000 American dead only a fraction of American casualties in previous conflicts. Iraqi losses however cannot be calculated.
Iraqi bombing attacks against Iraqi civilians are the direct result of their inability to engage and defeat American forces in pitched battles.
The use of cluster bombs have forced the use of different tactics.
Similarly in Chechnya, Russia use of cluster bombs annihilated Chechens units that attempted to prevent Russian armour from reaching Grozny.

The immediate effects of cluster bombs on the battlefield get attention on the front pages of newspapers.
Thousands of deaths in a few months is more newsworthy.
Thousands of maimings deaths of farmers plowing their fields or children picking up "toys" in a far flung Third World countries is not newsworthy.

The ignorance of most civilians in Western countries about military matters is staggering.
Few college educated twentysomethings will ever experience combat except in Hollywood movies or on their computer screens.
Modern armies use far fewer personnel than ever before because of the immense firepower available.
This has allowed smaller volunteer professional armies to exist rather than the enormous conscript armies of WW1 and WW2.
Elliminating cluster bombs means that armies will suffer higher casualties from enemy attack.
The level of firepower they can bring to bear on the enemy will be significantly reduced
The AK-47 rifle was so successful because it could be so easily manufactured and the most illterate peasant could learn how to use it after 10 minutes of demonstration. The weapon could survive extremes of heat and cold, submerged in mud or run over by a truck and still fire effectively. A Kalashnikov that has not been field stripped oiled and cleaned can still fire effectvely.
Modern volunteer armies could find themselves surrounded and annihilated by a much larger purely trained force armed with this extremely effective weapon.
Cluster bombs delivered by ground attack aircraft effectively neutralise the advantage.

The 21st century rivalries between the new and emerging superpowers such as China and India and the old superpowers such as Russia and the US mean that a third world war is very plausible as resources dwindle and collapsing Third World state are up for grabs.
We have seen the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather than convincing nations that nuclear weapons were too horrifying and immoral for any civilised nation to use, the have ploriferated. More and more nations have nuclear weapons and even more possess the means to build them.

The tragic rule of warfare has not changed and will never change.

The combatant with the edge over his enemy in terms of firepower will win the battle or make victory very costly for his opponent.

If cluster bombs give a nation the ability to defeat an army bigger than its own, cluster bomb will inevitably be used.

Nothing has changed since the first caveman that picked up a rock or a club.