Officials: Hundreds of Iraqis Killed By
Faulty Grenades
By Thomas Frank
June 22, 2003
Washington -- Hundreds and possibly thousands of Iraqi civilians have
been killed or maimed by outdated, defective U.S. cluster weapons that lack a
safety feature other countries have added, according to observers, news
reports and officials.
U.S. cluster weapons fired during the war in March and April dispersed
thousands of small grenades on battlefields and in civilian neighborhoods
to destroy Iraqi troops and weapons systems.
But some types of the grenades fail to explode on impact as much as 16
percent of the time, according to official military figures. Battlefield
commanders have reported failure rates as high as 40 percent.
Unexploded grenades remain potentially lethal for weeks and months after
landing on the ground, where civilians can unwittingly pick them up or
step on them. Many victims are children such as Ali Mustafa, 4, whose eyes were
blown out when a grenade he played with near his Baghdad home in April
exploded in his face.
The "dud rate" for cluster grenades can be reduced to less than 1
percent by installing secondary fuses that blow up or neutralize grenades that
fail to explode on impact, according to defense contractors. In early 2001, the
Pentagon said it would achieve that goal, but not until 2005. In the
meantime, the military continues to use a vast arsenal of cluster grenades
that fail to meet the new standard.
Former military officials and defense experts say the effort to improve
the grenades was given a low priority and little funding.
"The Army is behind, and the Army is moving very slowly," said retired
Army Lt. Gen. Michael Davison, now president of the U.S. division of
Israel Military Industries, which has made 60 million grenades with secondary
fuses. "It's a sorry situation that we didn't have secondary fuses on the
artillery submunitions that were fired in the last several wars."
Britain, which joined the United States in the fight to oust Saddam
Hussein, fired 2,000 artillery cluster weapons in the war. All were
equipped with Israeli-made grenades with secondary fuses and a 2 percent dud
rate,
the British Defense Ministry said.
The United States fired cluster weapons as bombs, rockets and artillery
shells, which open like a clam to scatter hundreds of grenades over an
area as large as several city blocks. Almost all of the U.S. grenades had one
standard fuse, according to military records and officials. A notable
exception was a type of cluster bomb carrying newly designed -- and
expensive -- grenades with infrared sensors that seek armored vehicles and
self-destruct if none is found.
As small as medicine bottles and often draped with short ribbons,
unexploded grenades attract children who mistake them for toys. On the
April day when Ali Mustafa lost his eyes -- an explosion that injured his
brother and friend -- the three were taken to a Baghdad hospital where two other
youths were being treated for cluster grenade wounds.
Ali Hamed, 10, of Baghdad, had his stomach ripped open and bowel
perforated when a grenade that he and friends were playing with blew up.
Shrapnel ripped into the buttocks of Saef Sulaiman, 17, after his
younger brother brought a live grenade into their Baghdad home. Sulaiman said
his
8-month-old sister, who had been resting on the living-room floor, was
killed in the explosion.
Ali Hamed's mother said two friends of her son's were killed when Ali
was hurt.
Another Iraqi child who picked up a grenade survived when Army Sgt. Troy
Jenkins took it from her. The grenade then exploded. Jenkins was killed.
The military has not said how many troops have been killed or injured by
unexploded grenades. But the 1991 Gulf War revealed their danger.
A congressional report found that grenade duds killed 22 U.S. troops --
6 percent of the total American fatalities -- and injured 58 as forces swept
the Iraqi military out of areas in Kuwait's desert that the Americans had
just shelled.
The Army said in a post-war report that "the large number of dud U.S.
submunitions ... significantly impeded operations."
A U.S. mine-clearance company found 118,000 unexploded cluster grenades
in just one of the seven Kuwaiti battlefield sectors, according to the
General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative agency. Military documents
and
officials estimated the dud rate at 8 percent to 40 percent.
The total number of unexploded grenades in the region was estimated at
1.2 million by Human Rights Watch, which opposes cluster weapons. It estimated
fatalities at 1,220 Kuwaitis and 400 Iraqi civilians.
Forced to confront the problem of unexploded cluster
grenades, the
military focused on training U.S. troops to clear them and avoid them in
the battlefield instead of making improvements to reduce their number, defense
experts said.
"We didn't do a whole lot that cost a whole lot of money," said Richard
Johnson, a defense consultant and retired Army colonel who spent 30 years
working in ammunition acquisition programs.
The Pentagon acknowledged in a 2000 report on cluster weapons that "a
significant percentage of these submunitions may not detonate reliably."
The report said "corrective measures are under way" but said the Pentagon
would not retrofit the cluster grenade inventory, which an earlier report said
numbered 1 billion.
Retrofitting the entire grenade stockpile was deemed too costly, at $11
billion to $12 billion, according to a 1996 Army report. But the report
also noted that cleaning up dud grenades was so costly that in certain limited
conflicts "costs for retrofit of our ammunition might be recovered from
the elimination of future cleanup costs."
The military has been trying to improve grenade reliability, but
technological problems and the complexity of cluster weapons have caused
delays. "I don't think anybody is happy with the current fusing," one Army
official said.
Two people close to the Navy said recently that reports of civilian
casualties have reignited what they called a stalled Navy effort to modify
one type of grenade considered notoriously unreliable by experts. A
military report indicates 36,179 such grenades were used in Iraq.
Lt. Col. Stephen Lee, who manages an Army program to upgrade
cluster-weapon safety, said, "There have been major improvements; it's
just that they're not fielded yet."
Speaking about a type of grenade used widely in Iraq, Lee said, "There
really is no difference in terms of the dud rate between the first Gulf
War and the most recent conflict in Iraq."
Experts say the military has focused on building new precision weapons
systems. "Safety and collateral damage are not as high a priority as
mission effectiveness," said David Ochmanek, a RAND Corp. defense analyst who
was
a deputy assistant defense secretary in the Clinton administration.
The Defense Department defended its recent use of cluster weapons in
Iraq. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed the
civilian casualties on Hussein for deliberately placing Iraqi weapons in
populated areas where they would draw return fire. "War is not a tidy
affair. It's a very ugly affair," Myers said in April. "And this enemy had
no second thoughts about putting its own people at risk."
The U.S. military has known about the dangers of the unexploded grenades
for decades, since the Vietnam War, when Viet Cong fighters used
unexploded grenades as land mines against the U.S. forces that fired them by the
millions.
In the three decades since, the duds have killed thousands in Laos, says
the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross, human rights
groups and the European Parliament have campaigned to ban cluster-weapon
use until nations agree to improve grenade reliability, avoid firing them in
populated areas and regulate their cleanup.
The United States did little in the 1970s and 1980s to improve the
reliability of the grenades, said Darold Griffin, former deputy director
for research and development in the Army Material Command. "Some felt duds
were an asset on the battlefield. You fire them into an area where an enemy is,
and having some duds decreases his freedom of movement," he said.
Countries that have fought wars on their own soil, most notably Israel,
have made improvements, out of fear that duds would harm their own
civilians and under public pressure. Israeli-made grenades now have a dud rate
of
less than 1 percent, said Davison, the Israeli Military Industries official.
The company has sold tens of millions of grenades to Britain, Germany, Denmark
and Finland, and to Switzerland, which has proposed international
standards to improve grenade reliability.
Sweden also requires its cluster grenades to have secondary fuses, said
Lt. Col. Olof Carelius of the Swedish Armed Forces.
Grenades fail to detonate mostly when their landing impact is lessened,
because they fall on a soft surface or sloped terrain, or they collide in
midair and lose speed. The Pentagon says many grenades fail only 2 percent
of the time but acknowledges dud rates are difficult to ascertain and vary
widely depending on conditions. It says the weapons are ideal for hitting
spread-out targets like troop formations and tank columns.
But the consequences of failure rates are magnified by the numbers of
grenades used: To destroy one air-defense system covering 100 square yards
requires 75 rockets, each carrying 644 grenades -- a total of 48,300. The
16 percent failure rate listed by the Pentagon produces 7,728 unexploded
grenades, scattering them over 600 square yards.
Bonnie Docherty, part of a Human Rights Watch team that recently spent a
month surveying battle damage throughout Iraq, said she "saw evidence of
thousands of submunitions in or near populated areas."
Cluster-weapon use was "significantly more extensive than in
Afghanistan," where the United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs containing
248,056
grenades in a six-month span, according to Human Rights Watch.
A report by the Air Force in late April said U.S. aircraft over Iraq
dropped 1,714 cluster bombs containing about 275,000 grenades. No report
is available on the number of ground-fired cluster weapons, but throughout
the war launchers could be seen firing grenade-carrying rockets.
Efforts to improve grenades stalled when an Army contractor, KDI
Precision Products Inc. of Cincinnati, proved unable to mass-produce a secondary
fuse for new grenades. A contract signed in 1987 was canceled in 2000.
"It's not an easy technical problem to solve," KDI president Eric
Guerrazzi said. He and others say the program might have succeeded with
more funding, perhaps to pay a competing firm to work as well on developing the
fuses.
Spending on munitions research and procurement dropped from $18 billion
a year during the 1980s to about $6 billion a year after the Cold War.
"The funding for R and D [research and development] in the Army was
minimal, and fusing was the last on the list," said Bruce Mueller, a
former Army lieutenant colonel who managed the fuse program for defense
contractor Raytheon. "They develop weapons, then they develop munitions, and
after
they develop munitions, the last thing they worry about is how to fuse them."