Darth Wong wrote:Napalm would present less of a long-term hazard than cluster munitions do.
But it would also be military far less effective and cover a much smaller area, meaning you have to drop about ten times as much napalm as cluster bombs for the same results, and even then against targets like light armored vehicles even that ratio might not be sufficient. For the US this is less of an issue since we can afford so many air sorties and so many air and ground fired guided weapons, but for our allies, well, they’ll just keep using cluster bombs. Many US allies already produce older US cluster bomb designs, ones which have dud rates as high as 10, even 20 percent. If we wont sell them newer ones, then they’ll just keep producing and using the old ones, or buy from China. Somehow I don’t think the dud rate on a Chinese cluster bomb is going to be low.
Anguirus wrote:
If this standard extremely difficult to meet? If so, why?
It has so far been impossible to meet. The US has been working to reduce due rates since the Gulf War, and not one design has acutely achieved less then 1%. I think the best they got was 1.4% and that was only in tests of individual bomb lets, not complete cluster bomb dispensers dumping out 300 of the things at once. Still dud rates are now much lower, more like 2-3% on average rather then 10%.
In fact the reality is few if any explosive weapons are so reliable that they could reach such a low dud rate, never mind doing so in a device which weighs maybe two pounds total. Remember a fuse doesn’t just have to make the bomb explode, it also has to ensure it will not explode before you want it too, such as if an airman loading the bomblet into a dispenser drops it on the floor. So it has to have a safe/arm device which knows when the conditions to arm itself have been met. Then even if it does arm, it has to strike the ground with enough force to detonate itself (that’s a big hangup with cluster bombs, they just don’t hit that hard) and even if the fuse devices to fire, the chemicals in the trigger and booster charges still have to work, and then the main charge has to work. All of this has to happen after the fuse and bomblet is made by the lowest bidder, held in a bunker for ten or twenty years, then moved halfway around the world and dropped on or fired at the enemy.
The introduction of electronic fuses allowed for the incorporation of a time delay based self destruct circuit, but while that helps destroy bomblets which just didn’t hit the ground hard enough to trigger the fuse, it doesn’t do much to help when the fuse is just defective.
Back in Vietnam we had dud rates as high as 20% for even large unitary aircraft bombs, and sometimes entire batches of artillery fuses had to be rejected because none of them worked. Its just not easy to make a safe and reliable fuse. If you sacrificed all safety for the user then things would be simpler.
How heavily do we expect to employ cluster bombs and/or napalm in a future engagement?
The US has found replacements for most uses of cluster bombs, but we still need them for MLRS rockets and to a lesser extent 155mm artillery, and many targets for air attack are just too big and dispersed to be effectively hit with unitary guided weapons unless you drop a very huge number of them. Many Tomahawk cruise missiles for example are armed with bomblets.
One of the problems is guided weapons only work if you have a specific point to aim them at. If the target is say 500 yards of treeline an entire enemy infantry company is occupying, guided weapons don’t help you out too much, you need an area weapon. Abet some weapons like the mentioned Tomahawk combined highly accurate guidance and bomblet warheads because that’s just how some targets are best hit with like an aircraft flightline.
However what works for the US and its 500 billion dollar defence budget doesn’t always work for say Egypt (which current license produces US M85 bomblets with a dud rate over 10%) or Morocco with much more limited means of delivery and spending.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
