Dan Rice tells of background behind Washington’s change of stance on cluster munitions for Ukraine
That’s according to Dan Rice, a former special advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi and currently President of American University of Kyiv, who spoke in an interview with Ukrinform.
"We (the U.S. – ed.) fortunately never planned to fight a major war with High Explosive artillery rounds, so we didn’t have that many. So we started to run out… of the inferior rounds. Which forced politicians to have to approve- if we run out of High Explosive (HE) and won’t give DPICM (dual purpose improved conventional munitions), then Ukraine is out of artillery ammo and is dead. So it forced politicians to say “yes” to cluster munitions. Thank God we didn’t produce more HE in the past or we would be stuck using it!" Rice said.
He added that initially the topic of this type of munitions was not brought up publicly as such.
“These are old, outdated weapons (but they work great), so there were no lobbyists to help, no one was going to make any money sending in 1 million rounds of DPICM that were made in the 1990s. I was the only one speaking about this for the first six months until it gained momentum and that only happened in around March 2023," Rice said.
He noted that he had been working to rally support of generals, senators, members of Congress, key defense industry players, as well as the press.
It was a life experience to be a part of the process and I hope it helps Ukraine. I wish it was a year earlier, but nonetheless glad we approved it.
Chairman McCaul of the House Foreign Relations Committee really helped when he led the letter to the President in March,” the ex-advisor said, sharing some details.
However, the turning point, in his opinion, was the public support of the idea by the former head of the CIA, General David Petraeus, which he expressed during a visit to Kyiv in early June 2023.
It helped to "get middle of the road politicians in the U.S. on board, and very soon after him speaking, cluster munitions were approved by both parties and by the President.," Rice noted.
He also emphasized that in the event of a direct military conflict between the U.S. and Russian armies, the Americans would not hesitate to use cluster munitions on the battlefield.
“Cluster munitions have always been the US and NATO planned defense against numerically superior artillery (whether it was a Russian, Chinese or North Korean invader- all of them have doctrine with superior artillery),” he explained.
If the US was fighting the Russian Army, the graduate of the West Point Academy notes, “We would immediately fire cluster munitions.”
“It is a legal weapon within our arsenal. It is moral. It is not against the Geneva Convention. The use of cluster munitions is delegated to the Combatant Commander, usually a three or four-star general, as per the guidance provided as recently as March 2022. That is our policy and our doctrine if US soldiers were fighting Russians directly,” Zaluzhnyi’s former special advisor told Ukrinform.
He also wondered: “Why it was different for Ukrainian soldiers fighting an invading force of Russians has been my concern and position all along: it shouldn’t be any different! Ukrainian soldiers deserve to have DPICM cluster munitions.”
As Ukrinform reported, in early July, the U.S. Department of Defense announced the allocation of a $800 million package of military aid to Ukraine, which includes cluster munitions.
Soon, the DoD officially confirmed that these munitions had already been delivered to Ukraine.
A Ukrainian diplomat told the OSCE that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would deploy cluster munitions only in areas where Russian troops are concentrated in the temporarily occupied territories, thoroughly recording all such cases.
According to the American side, cluster munitions that the U.S. recently shipped to Ukraine are already being used on the battlefield in a proper and effective manner.
