Europe needs to get over its cluster bomb qualms to defend itself, experts say

Yahoo

27-04-2025

Europe needs cluster munitions to defend itself from Russia, two military analysts say.
If the US backs away from NATO, European militaries will need them to knock out Russian air defenses.
Bomblets can degrade air defenses by spreading damage. They also endanger civilians.
Cluster munitions have earned a reputation as one of the ugliest weapons. By scattering lots of small bombs over a wide area, they killed and maimed so many civilians that more than 100 nations — including most of Europe — signed an international ban.
But if Europe is serious about defending itself from a potential Russian invasion, it will need to bring back cluster munitions, a British think tank warns.
The problem is that Europe lacks the ground forces to stop a massive Russian invasion. NATO would need to compensate — as it did during the Cold War — with airpower to pound Russian troops and supply lines to give its much smaller armies a fighting chance. The Warsaw Pact fielded 295 divisions and 69,000 tanks as compared to NATO's 170 divisions and 28,000 tanks.
Yet Russian anti-aircraft defenses would inhibit European air operations. "NATO land forces are overwhelmingly dependent on air power for fires," Justin Bronk and Jack Watling wrote in a report for the Royal United Services Institute. "Without large-scale US assistance, however, European air forces would currently struggle to roll back dense and integrated air defense systems (IADS) such as those protecting Russian forces."
Russia has created a multilayered network of mobile short-, medium- and long-range surface-to-air missiles and radars. Any aircraft attacking short- or medium-range missile batteries risks coming under attack from long-range missiles.
"Modern Russian air defense systems have far greater range, are more mobile, more resilient and significantly more lethal than any faced by NATO forces in conflict," RUSI said.
Normal practice would be for an advanced air force to first concentrate on knocking out enemy air defenses before supporting the ground forces. Israel failed to do this in the 1973 October War, and paid a heavy price. But Israel did accomplish this with stunning success in the 1982 Lebanon War, as did America in Desert Storm in 1991. Aircraft equipped with anti-radar missiles and jammers hunted radars and surface-to-air missile batteries.
But Europe lacks these capabilities. It is the US that has provided the bulk of air defense suppression systems for NATO. Yet with the Trump administration distancing itself from NATO — or potentially even withdrawing — from the alliance, Europe faces the prospect of tackling Russian air defenses on its own.
The "limited training and capability development for the suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses (SEAD/DEAD) in most European countries since the end of the Cold War has made the availability of [close air support] doubtful during the initial period of any war between peer adversaries," the report said.
This means that Europe's undermanned and underequipped armies would have to fight without air support. Or, European armies have to destroy those air defenses themselves to allow friendly aircraft to operate. "Land forces cannot wait for air forces to complete the SEAD/DEAD campaign before they themselves are committed — they must be able to operate for a sustained period while the airspace is still heavily contested," said RUSI.
Ideally, long-range ground-based weapons — such as Lockheed Martin's ATACMS ballistic missiles — would target air defenses. But there are limited stockpiles of these $1 million munitions, and Russia has been able to jam their GPS guidance. No less important is that Russian anti-aircraft missiles, such as the SA-17, SA-20 and SA-28, are designed to shoot down ballistic missiles and artillery rockets. "The capacity of Russian SAM systems to shoot down incoming munitions of various kinds has been demonstrated hundreds of times over the three years since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began," RUSI noted.
One solution is for Europe to bring back cluster weapons. "Cluster munition warheads have consistently proven more effective for DEAD [destruction of enemy air defenses] fire missions than unitary variants," RUSI said. Multiple warheads mean a single cluster-carrying munition can destroy multiple vehicles and other components of an air defense battery, "while cluster munitions' wider area of effect means that they suffer less severely from degradation of accuracy due to hostile EW [electronic warfare]."
With European armies lacking adequate stockpiles of artillery pieces and howitzer shells, cluster munitions may be a lifeline. "The evidence from Ukraine demonstrates that there is a difference in effectiveness such that any military that is constrained on the number of fire missions it can conduct should probably prioritize cluster munitions for its artillery," said RUSI.
In fact, the US and Europe have already supplied cluster munitions to Ukraine that proved deadly against Russian forces. For example, in 2023 the US — which has not ratified the cluster bomb treaty — sent Ukraine M864 155-mm howitzer shells that each carried 72 submunitions. The sale took place despite concerns that 6% of those submunitions would be duds that could lay on the ground for years, threatening civilians. It also supplied Ukraine with ATACMS missiles that each carry 950 bomblets.
Bringing back cluster munitions would be politically fraught in Europe. Yet Lithuania already withdrew from the cluster munition treaty in 2024.
"It seems that many European nations may have to do the same if they are to be able to guarantee their security in the absence of a major US commitment to the theatre, mitigating the ethical concerns by limiting the context in which such munitions are employed, and investing in reducing the dud-rate of newly produced munitions," the RUSI experts recommended. In addition, Europe should invest in more standoff weapons and loitering munitions to target Russian air defenses without endangering manned strike aircraft.
If Europeans choose to forego cluster munitions out of ethical concerns, they shouldn't expect Russia to do the same. "It is also worth noting that Russian forces make extensive use of cluster munitions," the authors pointed out. Thus, "ethically motivated self-limitation by the defending side would not obviate the need for a large-scale post-conflict unexploded ordinance clearance and disposal effort to avoid lasting risk to civilians."
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Read the original article on Business Insider