With North Korean Threats Looming, the U.S. Army Pursues Controversial Weapons

After the Pentagon scuttled a longstanding pledge to destroy its existing cluster-munitions stockpile, the Army is moving ahead with renewed vigor to acquire at least three new foreign-made versions of the weapons for its artillery. Late last year, the Trump administration canceled a Defense Department policy that limited the military’s ability to use cluster munitions, which, at a conference on Friday in Arlington, Va., Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan attributed specifically to the threat posed by North Korea.

Cluster munitions are a type of weapon that distributes smaller weapons, called submunitions or bomblets, over a targeted area. They have been condemned by lawmakers and arms-control groups for causing indiscriminate harm to civilians even decades after conflicts end. The now-abandoned policy, drafted in 2008 under Robert Gates, the defense secretary at the time, required any submunitions used after 2018 to have a dud rate, or the percentage of submunitions that don’t detonate when they are supposed to, of 1 percent or less — a standard the Pentagon appeared unable to meet, even a decade after the policy was put in place. The 2017 policy change stated that newly produced cluster munitions must have a dud rate of 1 percent or less, but left open the use of older cluster munitions with higher dud rates, which allowed the United States to maintain its large cluster-munitions stockpile. The Army has since ramped up its effects to seek newer cluster-munition models.