155mm...more or LESS!

SO....
'Cluster bombs' burst onto the news cycle this week, in a story I first heard on Government Funded radio.
I'll give 'fake news' rare credit for using the more accurate term:
Cluster Munitions.

People are also shocked to learn that cluster munitions are 'outlawed' by a an 'international convention' which means that they're not really prohibited at all.
(See Also: The U.N.)

This 'not-a-law' is called:
The Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) - an international treaty that prohibits all use, transfer, production, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, a type of explosive weapon which scatters submunitions ("bomblets") over an area. Additionally, the convention establishes a framework to support victim assistance, clearance of contaminated sites, risk reduction
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions.

We didn't sign the CCM because the nations that we're most likely to have to fight soon didn't sign it either.

Unlike those other nations, WE DO have a standard of using munitions with a less than 1% (probably double than - real world) dud rate.
Also, unlike the Rooskies in particular, we refrain from dropping REAL (incendiary, sometimes) CLUSTER BOMBS on hospitals after some moron draws lines in the sand and then fails to back it up.


So:
WHY do this??

The answer is that we're running OUT of the regular shells.
Rapidly!
IN APRIL this story 'broke' noticed by nearly nobody....
South Korea to lend 500,000 rounds of artillery shells to US -report | Reuters

The other answer is (of course) we've been sending the Ukies cluster munitions it all along.
Our sloth-like media is just now figuring out some of it - although their lack of intellectual curiosity fails them at the 'why' part.
I would say that they are hiding the truth, but I do not ascribe evil intent to an institution when the more obvious reason is incompetence.
Example:
We famously sent over the HIMARS system, which is a launcher replacement for the famous MLRS that we used to great effect in Gulf-I.
We said that we would most assuredly not send the tactical missiles for the HIMARS but we never said that we would NOT send ALL of the other loads for this system!
IYKYK!!


As far as the Artillery......
A 155mm (6.1 inch) artie round is like a 12-gauge shot-shell.
They're the standard NATO shell size, and you can shoot a lot of different types of shells in the same weapon to do different things.
Think: HE, frag, smoke, illumination, gas, mine deployment, cluster rounds, etc.

The "standard" 155mm shell is the old-school HE (High Explosive) bursting round which does it's thing with fragmentation and blast effect. The 'boom' is the 'Hollywood' part but it's the frags that the pros worry about.
They cost about $1000, weigh roughly 100 pounds and they have about a 20 pound bursting charge, which converts the rest of the shell into those high-speed fragments which tend to do the real work.
Cannon-cockers can lob them out to something like 15 miles with decent accuracy.
There are "smart rounds" in various stages of development that do some pretty weird and interesting things.
The USN even put a 155mm gun on their newest Destroyers, which DID do some amazing things but the projectiles proved to be so expensive that they canx'd the programme and are developing something even newer, more expensive and less likely to work out.

Simply Put:
We have the ability to make X number of rounds per month.
The Ukies have been burning through Y number of shells - and we're running out of both new and old shells to throw at this conflict - especially since we've been at a state of constant low intensity warfare since 2001.

We have a LOT of the older style 155mm cluster rounds that we have not yet converted into the newer Dual Purpose (cluster) rounds. Why not give them to the Ukies?
They want them.
We have them.
We're not going to use them, since they do not meet our self-imposed standards for dud rates.
This isn't a policy that I necessarily AGREE with - but, it's the Ukies country, and THEY didn't sign the CCM EITHER!

 

About 6.1 inches, more or less.

The Rooskies prefer air-dropped incendiary cluster munitions, preferably delivered in urban areas.
Ask the republic of Chechnya.
Oh wait.
You can't.
They don't really exist any longer, at least not as an independent republic.
Apparently, they were not white enough, or Christian enough, or Western European enough to spend 700,000,000,000.00 on -eh?
Sorta like the Georgians?

Which time?
2014?
2018?
2022?
How about Georgia in 2008, or the elimination of the the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in 2000?

U.S. War machine, indeed!