Is it poor build quality or are they not designed to explode on impact?
In: 1717
It depends on the type, some cluster weapons are designed like you said to airburst and scatter over an area, detonating within a few seconds, they get failures due to ma unfaltering like they all do, but there is also an element of fratricide where some bombs go off and either damage or destroy others, but that effect also causes the damages ones not to explode or to become buried, or even pitched offline a few hundred meters in the explosion, to be found further down the line. The US ones have a failure rate per unit of 2-4%, and they class anything that doesn’t go off as a failure, not necessarily a dud. Some of the Russian made knew have a failure rate of 40% which is nuts and will be an ongoing problem in Ukraine for 20 years
There are some cluster bombs with a mixture of bomblet types, some are actual mines operated by proxy, wire or being stepped on, while there may be delayed fuse ones, designed to catch first responders to an attack. Some are designed to Bury themselves in soft ground and then arm themselves, these are “area denial weapons”, or deployable minefields, hidden by the initial attack.
As far as I understand, the bomblets have a chance of hitting each other midair during release which might damage them enough to make them defective. Of course this is on top of all the other quality control reasons that an explosive might be defective.
Volume. Even if failure rates are low, the number of submunitions/bomblets is large. A artillery DPICM round contains 88 bomblets. If the failure is around 2.5 percent, that’s about 2 bomblet duds per bomb dropped. Now drop a few thousand of these bombs, and you will litter an area like Bakhmut with thousands of very dangerous duds.
Everyone here is pointing out general issues with munitions. Every type of ammo will have duds. Any kind of shell/bomb can land weird in a way that prevent it from detonating. Cluster bombs are unique in their failure rate because of the unique way the weapons work. When the cluster bomb opens up and the bomblets are deployed some inevitably collide with each other. This does not happen with non cluster munitions like artillery shells, rockets, bombs etc. Its during these collisions that cluster munitions get damaged, and this damage results in their relatively high dud rate. The dud rate for a US cluster bomb is about %2.5, while the dud rate for a Russian one is %30-40. Using cluster bombs comes with additional responsibilities. You have to keep accurate records of where they are dropped, and you have to de-mine those areas.
Right now there is a Russian propaganda campaign to prevent the US from sending these weapons to Ukraine. You will see people shilling for the Russians calling the use of the weapon horrific because of the harm they can cause civilians, despite Russia already using cluster munitions with 10x dud rate in Ukraine.
It’s just big numbers at work. If you have a given percentage of things that are going to fail, as you use more of them you will experience some of those failures. Cluster munitions, m26a1 in the case of what is going to Ukraine, break open and drop a bunch (518) of submunitions (m85 specifically) over an area about the size of a football field. Those submunitions are basically grenades with a small parachute ribbon to arm them. Once they hit the ground they are supposed to detonate. This iteration of munitions also has a time fuse (m235) to scavenge any munitions that don’t detonate when they impact as they are supposed to. Testing has shown a dud rate of less than 1% on these rounds which is much better than many, but still not zero.
the issue is less that they don’t explode, every bomb has that problem, and more that they’re impossible to keep track of.
a conventional bomb used for the same purpose is comparable in size and weight to a refrigerator *at least* and looks exactly how you expect a bomb to look. a cluster bomb sub-munition is basically a can of hairspray, or a softball made of metal.
both can fail to detonate, but you aren’t going to accidentally step on a refrigerator sized steel cylinder sitting in a crater, and your kids aren’t going to bring one home because it’s a neat bauble they found in the woods.
also related, the side that drops a bomb knows where it is, within reason. if you bombed a thing and it didn’t explode, you know there’s a single un-detonated bomb down there. if you drop a cluster bomb, you don’t know how many of the little things failed to explode, and god knows where any of them are. if it didn’t explode, one of its siblings could have thrown it into the sunset.
Pretty much any manufactured product can potentially be defective due to imperfections in the materials or the manufacturing process. So you have to test the products as they’re being made in order to prevent defective ones from being shipped.
For something like a light bulb, that’s as simple as plugging it in and seeing if it lights up. The problem with munitions in general is, you can’t really “test” a bomb without blowing it up and you can’t blow up the same bomb twice. So the best we can do is test a few bombs from each batch, and if those are good we can reasonably assume the rest of the batch is good. But, a certain percentage of the bombs in that batch will likely still be defective and we have no way to determine exactly which ones are defective without blowing them all up.
The problem with cluster munitions specifically is that they have a lot of small bombs inside them (called bomblets). That means if you have a failure rate of just 1% then 1 in every 100 bomblets will fail to explode. If you have a cluster bomb that drops 200 such bomblets, and you drop 10 of them, then there’s probably around 20 bomblets that didn’t explode.
Now if you have a conventional bomb with a 1% failure rate, you would have to drop 100 of them before one of them fails. But you probably have the benefit of knowing which one failed and a pretty good idea of where it landed. With cluster bombs you won’t notice if 1 or 2 out of 200 bomblets didn’t detonate, and they’re spread out randomly over a wide area by design.
Bombs are made with a lot of safety in mind. You need to be able to transport these things over rough terrain, inside a moving tank or in the back of a big truck. All the safety that is built into the bomb means that there is a significant chance it doesn’t even go off when it is supposed to. A cluster bomb is really made up of a lot of smaller bombs and each of these bombs has the same safety inside it, so there’s a good chance some of them don’t explode when they’re supposed to. This is *good* because if they exploded too easily, they would blow up in transport and kill your own people.
270 million bombs were illegally dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War. 45% of them didn’t go off.
Statistics.
Let’s say for every bomb you drop, there is a 1% chance due to conditions that it won’t go off. You can drop 459 regular bombs before having a near 99% chance to see one be unexploded.
Now cluster bombs have tens to hundreds of mini-bombs in them. Let’s say 200.
So now you only need to drop 3 cluster bombs to have that same near 99% chance for one of the mini-bombs to not explode.
And if you drop 459 cluster bombs (same as it took for the normal bombs to reach the 99% chance for one to fail), you will on average have 153 failures.
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