Copying my comment from a different conversation
They’re going to open a lot of the cluster bomb shells and use the armour piercing shapped bomblets as drone munitions.
US cluster bombs have 88 bomblets inside each shell. They also have a 1% to 3% dud rate on the bomblets, so that’s 2 to 3 duds per shell. Duds that turn into landmines. Use 10 shells on an area and you’ve suddenly laid 30 mines in that area. Mines that you have no idea where they’re placed.
So Ukrain can’t use the cluster bombs on any area they intend to occupy or traverse. They can’t use them on trench lines, they can’t use them on fields they would need to drive over.
I believe they will be used, but a lot of them will used for drone ammunition.
The math you’re using is a tad hyperbolic. 1 to 3% of 88 bomblets is not 2-3 duds, in fact it is less than 1 to 3. If you’re thinking about 10 shells we can do math with better precision, and the result is less than 30, it is 9 to 26. Nevertheless, the failure rate I’ve seen elsewhere is 2.76%, so for 10 shells that is 24 duds. At this stage you might think 24, 30, it’s almost the same… But also dud bomblets are not equivalent to mines. On the short term they are most definitely not like mines. On the long term, on the context of managing their danger, they can be thought of as mines, like mines left on a field for a long time. Some blow up, some don’t. Nobody wants them on their yard.
In all cases I’d use them in my yard if it helped me fight a murderous sadistic thief out of my stuff. If only just to disincentivize their murderous sadistic thieving actions from attacking my neighbours and other people.
TBF using them on dusty villages was way worse. This is probably necessary.
Russian clusters dud at like 40% where US clusters dud at 3%.
