- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE has quietly signed a $210 million deal to buy advanced cluster shells from one of Israel’s state-owned arms companies, marking unusually large new commitments to a class of weapons and an Israeli defense establishment both widely condemned for their indiscriminate killing of civilians.
The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department’s largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records, according to an online federal database that covers the last 18 years. In a reversal of the more commonly seen direction for weapons transfers between the countries — in which the U.S. sends its weapons to Israel — the U.S. will pay the Israeli weapons firm Tomer over a period of three years to produce a new 155mm munition. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations.
The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning.
“The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying,” said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion, which pushes to ban cluster munitions. She recalled speaking with a 17-year-old boy who found an unexploded cluster bomblet in his neighbor’s garden in the aftermath of the Bosnian War.
“He said he played with it for quite a while. Suddenly it exploded. It blew up both of his hands; it blew away part of his face as well,” she said.
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But major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons.
…you’re right, we should be able to kill more people effectively…it will end our imperative…
You mean we are buying something else and this is the cover
What a joke. For one thing we don’t have a use for these, for another we make our own. Obviously we shouldn’t be using them at all. We sent some to Ukraine the past few years, because fuck their farmers I guess. Besides for that, there is no use for cluster munitions, not the least from Israel that is making OUR designs, selling our own technology back to us, for a profit.
Cluster weapons are not banned. Some countries have entered into a treaty to not use them, but the US is not one.
I’d also add that my guess is that, as with land mines, the fairly-successful showing in the Russo-Ukrainian War means that weapons with submunitions probably are going to wax more than wane.
On 18 July 2024, the Parliament of Lithuania decided to withdraw from the convention.[37] The Lithuanian government argued that Russia has used cluster munitions extensively during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and would not hesitate to use them in conflict with NATO.[38] The government also pointed out that of the NATO states bordering Russia, only Lithuania and Norway were parties to the convention.[37] Lithuania deposited its instrument of withdrawal from the convention on 6 September 2024,[39] and the withdrawal took effect on 6 March 2025.[40]
For example, ATACMS missiles using cluster munitions made sticking aircraft and weapons in revetments — which Russia did at one helicopter airfield — a lot less effective for protection.
Correct.
Biden sent Ukraine loads of cluster munitions. I think depleted Uranium shells too. Because fuck the farmers, and whomever else. What’s a little collateral damage and nuclear waste amongst pals?
I did not vote for this. Some people did not vote. They voted for this. Then the final 30 per cent wanted this. Life is not a spectator sport.
This was what both candidates wanted. No matter who you voted for or if you didn’t vote, you voted for this.
So, what would you have suggested I do?
Tell your legislators about enacting ranked choice voting to diversify the pool of candidates.
Joined with the people calling for Harris to stop supporting genocide.
Everyone that told us to shut up and love genocide got their second choice.
