Via Natasha Chart, the case against cluster bombs -- a form of explosive that's unusually likely to wind up killing and maiming children. Senator Dianne Feinstein authored some anti-cluster bomb legislation that attracted 30 yea votes. Obama was among those voting "yes," Clinton among those voting "no" which I take as another sign that Obama is willing to think further outside the box than is Clinton on national security issues.
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Cluster Bombs
25 Feb 2008 09:00 am
Comments (38)
If you outlaw submunitions (cluster bomb is a propaganda term) then what are you going to do to replace most of the weapon systems of the United States? The reason everyone uses them is that they are very effective and save American lives by putting fewer people in the combat zone.
The idea that 25% or more of them are duds and that every dud kills or injuries a children is moronic.
I love the name, superdestroyer.
Cluster bombs is hardly a propaganda term. They've been called that since the 1980s without any hint of disapproval.
The idea that 25% or more of them are duds and that every dud kills or injuries a children is moronic.
...and not found in any of the links. But given that AFAICT an individual bomb can contain hundreds of submunitions, what child casualty rate would you find acceptable?
VERY IMPORTANT ADDENDUM:
The legislation in question has three words at the end that changes the whole context.
It's not just, "ban cluster bombs."
It's "ban cluster bombs in civilian areas."
That's a huge difference in policy. Banning cluster bombs outright is not what occured.
considering that cluster bombs were largely used in Israel's recent shelling of Lebanon, seemingly everything is in the ambit of the term "civilian area."
can Hillary ever say no to any military expenditure?
Clinton is far too big a coward to ever say no to the military.
"It's not just, "ban cluster bombs."
It's "ban cluster bombs in civilian areas."
That's a huge difference in policy.
It would be, if there were a clear demarcation between "civilian" and "non-civilian" areas. Let's consider the big picture here. Since the early 1970's, when we first deployed laser-guided bombs, we have spent huge amounts of money on making air strikes more accurate, and on avoiding civilian casualties. It's one thing to make bombs more accurate for military reasons -- planes need to carry fewer of them if each bomb can reliably destroy a tank or a fixed position -- but what has been the benefit to the U.S. of spending so much time and resources in trying to minimize civilian casualties? There doesn't appear to have been much benefit.
Even the most accurate bomb will kill civilians if enemy combatants deliberately operate from civilian areas, and it's not as if the U.S. gets any PR credit for spending more than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties. The myth of "surgical" air strikes also sometimes makes politicians forget the real costs and consequences of war. Maybe it would make more sense, and perhaps, be more humane in the long run, if we acknowledged the inherent brutality and mess of war and decided to use maximum force to win quickly, rather than minimal force to seek the approval of those who will never approve.
Are you also willing to take the higher military casualty rates that will result from such a policy?
I doubt it. Instead, in the event of such a ban, I expect advocates like Matt to constantly carp about casualty rates, never reflecting back on whether it might have something to do with trying to regulate weapons use.
"If you outlaw submunitions (cluster bomb is a propaganda term) ..."
Submunition is too broad a term. Clusterbomb is the correct term. Submunition can refer to any sub-unit delivered in this manner. Various types of sensors are also delivered as submunitions.
Perhaps HRC (and others) just feel safer not to do anything that might be taken as reflecting negatively on Israel's use of CB's in Lebanon.
Maybe it would make more sense, and perhaps, be more humane in the long run, if we acknowledged the inherent brutality and mess of war and decided to use maximum force to win quickly, rather than minimal force to seek the approval of those who will never approve.
Thanks, Fred...spoken like someone safe in the knowledge that he will never, ever be on the receiving end of such a policy.
"and it's not as if the U.S. gets any PR credit for spending more than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties."
How do you know we don't?
"and it's not as if the U.S. gets any PR credit for spending more than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties."
Not to mention, I'd love to know what orifice Fred pulled that stat out of. Given that I'm sure the US has spent more on war, period, than any country in history, it might technically be true.
As for getting "PR credit": Is that why we try to avoid civilian casualties? PR? Funny, I thought it might be because we were a humane country. But I guess Bush has made it clear that no longer applies, right, Fred?
(And no, I imagine we don't get much "PR credit" for alleged attempts to minimize civilian casualties in a war that was completely unnecessary and predicated on a lie to begin with. Funny how people can be.)
"Thanks, Fred...spoken like someone safe in the knowledge that he will never, ever be on the receiving end of such a policy."
Right: because the folks who want to attack us will scrupulously attempt to avoid civilian casualties, like they did on 9/11. I still have my visitor ID from the last meeting I had in 2 World Trade, weeks before the attack. I'm lucky I dragged ass on scheduling the follow-up meeting and ended up being elsewhere on 9/11.
Remember, according to Clinton's Defense Secretary William Cohen, on more than one occasion, air strikes targeting Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the '90's were scrapped because of fears of civilian casualties. I think most of us would agree that it would have been worth killing bin Laden and his key lieutenants then, even if it meant using cluster munitions and risking taking out a few nearby goat herders at the same time. So why tie our hands now?
Banning in civilian areas is really dodgy, too. Consider WWII, which most people think of as a necessary war.
Much of the Western front through France and into Germany was fought through civilian areas. Should certain classes of weapons have been avoided for fear of killing civilians, or was winning the war as quickly as possible a better idea?
Modern war has the same issues. Given the increasing urbanization of life, it's quite likely that war will be increasingly fought in urban - read, civilian - areas. There is no use of weapons in such areas that won't lead to civilian casualties, and many of the people we fight use that fact to their advantage, knowing that people like Matt will protest.
Maybe the anti-war activists would have more credibility if they also passed a resoltion calling for everyone to renounce car bombs. They are used in civilian areas, they kill civilians, and they are not built with the normal safety mechanisms.
Outlawing explosive submunitions would eliminate the MLRS/ATACMS systems. Instead of firing 12 rockets loaded with submunitions, the U.S. would have to launch hundreds of missiles filled with HE. Of course, it would kill more civilians but be less effective and harder to suport logistically. But then again, that is the real point of the ban.
Oh, please, Fred, fuck you and your WTC visitor badge. You demean the memory of everyone who died in those buildings in your sick attempt to prove that you were "on the front lines too" or whatever twisted mental bullshit is going in your alleged mind. You're one sick fuck.
Maybe it would make more sense, and perhaps, be more humane in the long run, if we acknowledged the inherent brutality and mess of war and decided to use maximum force to win quickly, rather than minimal force to seek the approval of those who will never approve.
Holy shit!
Only, Fred, if "acknowledging the inherent brutality and mess" was tantamount to avoiding wars, or treating them as an actual last resort.
"Maximum force" is what you use in self-defense. And "winning quickly" is precisely what we do with the surgical warfare approach. And "seeking approval" does, um, NOT accurately characterize the mentality of the Bush administration in launching its invasion of Iraq. More like, seeking less outrage than they'd already stirred up, for political reasons. Not exactly an honorable stance.
if we acknowledged the inherent brutality and mess of war and decided to use maximum force to win quickly, rather than minimal force to seek the approval of those who will never approve.
Maximum force? "Maximum force" means nuclear weapons -- as much force as possible, instant win. If you're not talking about nuclear weapons, you're not using maximum force. Of course this just means that "maximum force" is something only scum would contemplate using.
And as for this:
what has been the benefit to the U.S. of spending so much time and resources in trying to minimize civilian casualties? There doesn't appear to have been much benefit.... Maybe it would make more sense, and perhaps, be more humane in the long run, if we acknowledged the inherent brutality and mess of war and decided to use maximum force to win quickly, rather than minimal force to seek the approval of those who will never approve.
News flash: You don't try to minimize civilian casualties in order to win brownie points. You do it to not be evil scum -- a project you've obviously given up on. And you haven't provided a scintilla of evidence that more brutal methods lead to shorter wars and are more humane in the long run. Were the USSR and Iran less brutal in fighting their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Did they do any better?
Thanks, Matthew, for linking to my Scholars & Rogues post.
To Fred: The history of war demonstrates that a country's decision to terminate a conflict isn't decided on the basis of civilian casualties, but of damage to its military. The US is one of the few exceptions to the rule.
Which would make it a good candidate to use land mines and cluster bombs againt, right?
and it's not as if the U.S. gets any PR credit for spending more than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties.
That is correct. The U.S. is judged by other countries not for how many civilians we avoid killing, but by how many we actually kill. Compared to that metric, our professed intentions and tactics are irrelevant. When we drop bombs on civilian populations in Iraq, the survivors are unlikely to be grateful that we refrained from using bigger bombs.
All the same, I remain unclear as to the value of dropping cluster bombs in a city. How will this save the lives of more of our soldiers, as opposed to using other forms of air support? How do the merits of this tactic justify the increased civilian casualties?
Two points:
First, WWII analogies are not very helpful. The military conflicts of the 21st Century in which the United States participates are largely going to be asymmetric, and in fact minimizing civilian casualities to the extent possible is an important part of an effective strategy for such conflicts. And yes, the other sides in these conflicts are going to try to bait us into killing a lot of civilians whenever possible (they read the same books). But there is no reason to give them what they want.
Second, things like using car bombs to attack civilians, and most common "terrorist" tactics in general, are already illegal. In fact, usually they are plain murder and prosecutable as such, but they are also banned by the laws of war and prosecutable as such. Now, again it is true that the other sides in these conflicts will often violate these laws, because they know that they will immediately fail on a tactical level if they do not. But they typically pay a heavy strategic price whenever they use such tactics, and there is no reason for us to diminish that strategic price by failing to keep the morality and legality of our tactics at the highest possible level.
"Only, Fred, if "acknowledging the inherent brutality and mess" was tantamount to avoiding wars, or treating them as an actual last resort."
Fair enough.
"And "seeking approval" does, um, NOT accurately characterize the mentality of the Bush administration in launching its invasion of Iraq."
To the extent that Bush sought and received Congressional approval, and then spent months of painstaking diplomacy trying to win UN support, I'd say that involved more "seeking approval" than most American wars.
"Maximum force? "Maximum force" means nuclear weapons"
OK, perhaps "maximum force" warrants a few qualifiers. For the record, I don't think we should use chemical or biological weapons either.
"And you haven't provided a scintilla of evidence that more brutal methods lead to shorter wars and are more humane in the long run."
Where would you like me to start, with the Romans' leveling of Carthage? History is replete with examples.
In every war it insurhgency conflict I can think of that was fought with one side trying to adhere to post-WWII international law and the other side not, the side that fought all-out won.
It sucks badly, but there it is.
The benefit of going through enormous difficulty and deliberately sacrificing more American casualties to spare enemy civilians any harm is quite clear. It benefits enemy civilians considerably, keeps their morale and support of Jihad slaughter high. Their cheering of bushwhacking US guys and gals remains very high, because they think it is "safe" fun with no fear of American retaliation or repercussions.
War should be brutal, fought full power, and it should not spare enemy civilians that don't deserve sparing.
It was mass slaughter that broke the back of the Japanese. It was UK/USA torching and bombing of German civilians that forced Hitler to address widespread "defeatism" and make it a death penalty crime. In the South, what broke them was Sherman's March that burned a 20-mile wide swath of farms and villages, and Atlanta down and cut down any boy or woman defending their home from pillage and destruction.
That is how wars are won if the other side has no rules.
In the extreme, the Mongol and Roman model ensures no insurgencies or insurrections. You kill any enemy civilians that oppose you or sell them into slavery. You take their women, you kill their cattle and burn their fields...
Cluster bombs are a wonderful thing in war if you are a foot soldier hoping the enemy and it's civilian hangers about are wasted before you have to engage them mano a mano. They replaced napalm, which the do-gooders insisted we replace with more humane cluster bombs.
And if Islamoids continue to insist on fighting in areas full of civilians and launching rockets, mortars, and artillery from cities and villages, they are in no position to bitch, nor their Lefty Patsies, when counterbattery fire rains cluster bombs on their Katushka rocket, mortar, artillery positions...
As for little kids, when I was a kid in school in the Netherlands, we had school posters and instruction in how to recognize and avoid mines, grenades, unexploded shells, Nazi cluster bomblets that were still popping up 40 years later. The Dutch kids were well-aware of safety rules with war artifacts. Presumably, even if they are dumber than Dutch or Irsraeli kids - Muslim children are still not so stupid they cannot be educated not to fuck with unexploded ordnance, and Muslim woman not so lazy that they "blow off" giving their kids instruction or demanding schools give munitions training.
Glenn,
"Oh, please, Fred, fuck you and your WTC visitor badge. You demean the memory of everyone who died in those buildings in your sick attempt to prove that you were "on the front lines too" or whatever twisted mental bullshit is going in your alleged mind. You're one sick fuck."
Setting aside your unearned self-righteousness and presumption speaking for the dead, you have missed the point spectacularly. The victims in the WTC weren't "on the front lines". Neither were the victims in London, Madrid, etc. They were as "safe" in the knowledge that they wouldn't be on the receiving end of such an attack as the rest of us.
then spent months of painstaking diplomacy trying to win UN support
Cutest euphemism for "lied" I've ever seen.
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In the extreme, the Mongol and Roman model ensures no insurgencies or insurrections. You kill any enemy civilians that oppose you or sell them into slavery. You take their women, you kill their cattle and burn their fields...
Did you have one hand in your pocket while you were writing that? Because it has a distinct smell of the onanistic.
Or maybe the cheesy aroma is just the standard wingnut Cheetoes.
Of course you can solve every problem involving human beings by killing everyone who disagrees with you. But you're not going to kill a billion Muslims. You're not going to do anything other than fantasize.
Nice touch at the end too, that anyone blown up by leftover munitions deserves it for being stupid. If stupidity deserves death, I'm afraid your future is not very bright.
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I'd like to see them asked about this vote in the next debate. For now, I have to give the point to Obama. I don't think we need indiscriminate use of cluster bombs to accomplish our goals.
I cross-posted this same comment over on the Scholars & Rogues post:
I smell an unintended consequence coming on. Cluster bombs are used when the military objective requires destruction of fairly soft targets over a big area. Before the advent of cluster bombs, those targets would be attacked with saturation bombing using dumb iron bombs or with dumb artillery.
In saturation bombing, the amount of explosive you need to put on the target to achieve the same effect is much larger than in a cluster bomb attack of equal lethality. Consequently, the chance of mis-drops, long or short rounds, and really big unexploded ordnance goes way up. I'm not at all sure that the danger to nearby civilians would be reduced if you banned use of cluster bombs, even in fairly close proximity to populated areas. Indeed, you might easily have more unintended deaths. Yes, it's tragic (and newsworthy) when you have maimed kids. It's even more tragic--albeit less newsworthy--when the kid's entire family is vaporized in the mis-drop of a 500 lb. or 1000 lb. iron bomb.
I also have a non-rhetorical question for all of you: My understanding is that cluster munitions can be set to explode on contact or to have delayed fuzing that explodes later or when handled. The delayed versions serve pretty much the same purpose as anti-personnel mines. Do you have any idea whether anybody has characterized the risk to kids and other civilians in terms of the fuzing of the cluster munitions? It's quite possible that the bulk of the bad stuff that's happening is the result of delayed-fuzed bomblets, rather than the result of semi-duds.
I'd think that it would be fairly straightforward to get international agreements against delayed fuzing, along the same lines as the Ottawa Treaty. Of course, the major arms producers wouldn't ratify such an agreement, just as they didn't the Ottawa Treaty. That doesn't mean that its existence wouldn't be a powerful deterrent to the use of delayed fuzing.
**********
Several of you have been arguing about the military's use of precision-guided weapons to reduce civilian casualties. That's certainly an important side-effect of their use but please don't forget that the real reason they were invented and deployed is because they do a superior job of killing the people you want to kill. The fact that they don't kill the people you don't want to kill is merely a nice side-effect.
But they're ungodly expensive. You can't substitute 20 smart bombs for a single cluster bomb. It's simply too expensive. If you ban the use of cluster bombs, you'll have to substitute dumb bombs in saturation raids. That benefits no one.
"Second, things like using car bombs to attack civilians, and most common "terrorist" tactics in general, are already illegal. In fact, usually they are plain murder and prosecutable as such, but they are also banned by the laws of war and prosecutable as such. Now, again it is true that the other sides in these conflicts will often violate these laws, because they know that they will immediately fail on a tactical level if they do not. But they typically pay a heavy strategic price whenever they use such tactics, and there is no reason for us to diminish that strategic price by failing to keep the morality and legality of our tactics at the highest possible level."
Umm, no. Pretty much the exact opposite. When the enemy uses nasty tactics like car bombs, the left raises the cry that the war in question is unwinnable. The enemy uses these tactics not because they serve a military purpose, but because they serve a propaganda purpose. On people like Matt, and Duncan Black, it works exactly as the enemy intends.
You don't try to minimize civilian casualties in order to win brownie points. You do it to not be evil scum
Anyone who engages in war is, almost by definition, evil scum. War is not civilized, and as such is lawless almost by definition.
If I had to run a war, I'd rather be hated and considered evil scum for winning it effectively even at great cost to my enemy and their civilian population than be comfortable in my moral superiority for leaving my soldiers hunkered down in an occupation where I can't tell the insurgents from the civilians and I lose 10-100 soldiers every day for 20 years.
After all, great abuses done quickly create far less offense than small abuses done over a long period of time - the first gets it over and done with, and then you can get about the job of fixing all the damage you had to do to won while the second leaves you hated by the very people you're trying to help recover.
Um, I would guess there are relatively few people who would make the blanket statement that "Anyone who engages in war is evil scum."
And thank God Brian Angliss will never run a war
Why wouldn't you want me to run a war? Because I'd be more concerned about winning and then getting the hell out (or rebuilding the conquered nation from the ground up according to my own designs) than protecting civilians in a war zone? Because I'd accept that I had to be a monster in order to win? You could do a lot worse than me. At least I understand that war should always be a last resort. T too many of our politicians (globally, not just in the U.S.) fail to realize that fact.
As for anyone involved in war being evil scum, I probably should have said "waging" war instead, but oh well. Soldiers are trained to commit murder for the state, NM. They're (theoretically) given the psychological tools to deal with that fact, and the language of war is carefully created to make war more palatable, but nothing can change the fact that war is mass murder in the service of politics and the state.
Part of the problem is enemy ball-washers like Sunsin believe that enemy civilian lives are more valuable than American soldier lives on a one -for-one basis. And Sunsin, like good little craven Quislings, get all self-righteous when people point out the goal is to defeat the enemy, even if that means killing some of their families hanging with terrorists or helping Daddy with the Katushka rocket launches. The non-traitors think otherwise. So be it...better enemy civilians die if it makes our soldiers safer and their deaths are mainly the fault of enemy combatants whose tactics endanger them.. and our main imperative in war is not to make friends or fight with the welfare of enemy civilians the highest priority. It is to win, at the lowest cost possible in US lives and treasure.
And they believe in the unicorn, Boy Scout rules and unicorn theory of war that the nicer you are, the more the enemy people will love you back and give you a great strategic advantage. But they typically pay a heavy strategic price whenever they use such tactics, and there is no reason for us to diminish that strategic price by failing to keep the morality and legality of our tactics at the highest possible level.
Yes, one can just feel the misty golden rays of touchy-feely do-gooderism wrapping around that Lefty brain like a bucket of saccharine poured in through a hole in their skull.
But the lesson the Jewish Bolsheviks learned and passed on to all Communists, plus Nazis, and all insurgents is that the masses do not side with the nice guys that they can ignore - they side with the guys that will kill them unless they do exactly as the Bolsheviks and their successors demand. And the Left makes a point of not denouncing the democide committers, but the Western democracies restricted by laws they for now, accept.
And Islamoids, commie butchers, have long understood that they get a pass from criticism and each car bombing or dead American they can create - is a useful propaganda tool for their Leftist allies to blame America and the West.
As nicely put by DTM, avoiding civilian casualties in not only the right thing to do morally it's pragmatic, especially in the kinds of wars we're fighting now. Fans of Genghis Khan tactics should take note of the effect of Al Qaeda in Iraq's use of them, versus our attempts to be more civilized--they're increasingly isolated and losing the war. We're not, except in the sense perceptively identified by James Robertson.
Also well said by The Radical Moderate-would people really prefer that we use napalm, or ten 500 pounders instead of one CBU? This stuff is best left to the professionals, at least those who aren't professional at creating propaganda for stirring up the hysterics.
Once again, the wannabe military type morons reveal their utter cluelessness.
Cluster bombs have no legitimate purpose except area denial. They're the alternative to wasting manpower and time planting mines.
Which means they have exactly the same problems minefields have - except they're not marked as "minefield".
And the reason people oppose mines is because when the signs come down - the signs a cluster-bombed area doesn't even HAVE, MORONS! - civilians get killed in them.
In a war fought with some fucking COMPETENCE instead of the sort of brain dead military stupidity evidenced by our geniuses at the Pentagon and on this blog, area denial would be a non-issue. You couldn't care less about area denial.
Your goal is to knock out the command and control structure of the enemy forces, then outmaneuver whatever forces are left and wrap them up. Period. Area denial is USELESS in that endeavor.
Once again, crap weaponry like this is designed by idiots whose sole function is to come up with "neat" gadgets whose functionality and usability is limited, whose destructiveness is excessive, and which are expensive and meant to be paid for by taxpayer dollars.
The same applies to ninety percent of the so-called "smart bombs" - the vast majority of which missed their targets in 1991 - and probably in 2003, although I haven't seen the report yet.
Morons.
Robert Powell - Al Qaeda in Iraq aren't using Ghengis Kahn's tactics - they lack the manpower to do raze entire villages and cities, and that's what would be required if they were actually using Kahn's tactics. They're using standard terror and insurgent tactics.
However, that doesn't deny your point that avoiding civilian deaths is often a pragmatic goal - during an occupation and counter-insurgency. During an actual war (which is most definitely NOT what Iraq is at this point), avoiding civilian casualties just ties your hands and makes it easier for you to be defeated.
Richard S. Hack - There are two military reasons for cluster munitions, not just area denial.
The main reason that cluster munitions are used is because they're dramatically better at destroying military targets like armor, infantry, and other equipment than individual bombs or shells. When you drop a single bomb - even a smart bomb - on a target, you have one weapon that could easily miss. When you drop a cluster munition filled with multi-purpose submunitions (an explosively-formed anti-armor penetrator and a scored casing for anti-personnel use like a big grenade all in one) over a target, you dramatically increase the likelihood that you'll destroy the target because you have dozens or hundreds of explosives that cover the target. Assuming that the target is maneuverable, it's ability to maneuver to escape is nearly entirely negated.
Cluster bombs are also an intermediate step between large individuals bombs and fuel-air explosives, which, pound for pound, can produce massive destruction over a far larger area than an equivalently sized, non-nuclear individual bomb.
In addition, a single cluster bomb can be reconfigured for incendiary submunitions, multi-purpose submunitions, minelets (which is really the only area denial submunition I know of), cratering submunitions for use against infrastructure like airfields, and probably more.
If you've ever seen photos of the Highway of Death in the first Gulf War, the destruction of the column was done with cluster bombs, not saturation bombing from 500 lb bombs (just as an example). The column couldn't have been so effectively destroyed with saturation bombing as it was with cluster bombs.
Comments closed March 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
can Hillary ever say no to any military expenditure? she's so worried about looking weak that she over-compensates.
is there any difference between a crazy war-mongering hawk or a dove who votes and acts like a crazy war-mongering hawk?
Posted by rob! | February 25, 2008 9:09 AM