[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 104 (Tuesday, July 15, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1486-E1488]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                          HON. BETTY McCOLLUM

                              of minnesota

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 8, 2003

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the State of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 2658) making 
     appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal 
     year ending September 30, 2004; and for other purposes.
  Ms. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, today we are voting to fund the U.S. 
military to meet its future needs. Our duty to our servicemen and women 
is to provide them with the tools and the means to protect and defend 
our nation as well as protect them when in conflict. An issue that has 
persisted to be unsatisfactorily addressed by Congress is the 
endangerment of our soldiers and civilians--especially children--from 
the unexploded remnants of cluster munitions. These munitions disperse 
thousands of small grenades into areas of conflict that include 
battlefields but too often also include urban and rural areas inhabited 
by civilians.
  Cluster weapons have been used by U.S. military forces in conflict 
areas including Laos, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and most 
recently during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Unlike other military weapons, 
cluster bombs have a failure rate that can reach as high as 40 percent, 
leaving a trail of thousands of unexploded ordinance that cause death 
and destruction for our soldiers and civilian populations alike. This 
unexploded ordinance creates an extremely hazardous environment for 
soldiers patrolling the areas, future peacekeepers and civilians who 
unwittingly pick these weapons up or step on them--most frequently 
children.
  In Kosovo in 1999, five children playing with the colorful unexploded 
sub-munitions were killed. In Iraq, a child's eyes were blown out when 
a grenade he was playing with near his Baghdad home exploded in his 
face. Another young Iraqi man brought a grenade into his home, where it 
exploded, injuring the man severely and killing his 8-month old sister, 
who had been resting on the living-room floor.
  U.S. soldiers are in similar danger. As our troops in Iraq canvass 
the region, they encounter thousands of unexploded cluster grenades on 
the roads, in the homes and in the hands of the Iraqi people. It has 
made their job much more difficult, and in the case of Army Sergeant 
Troy Jenkins, has cost them their lives. Sergeant Jenkins was killed in 
Iraq when, after encountering a child who was handling a cluster 
weapon, the weapon exploded.
  The Department of Defense has correctly identified the problem of 
unexploded cluster bombs and is taking steps to ensure these weapons 
are safe. In 2001, then Defense Secretary William Cohen issued a 
Pentagon-wide memorandum calling on the Department to

[[Page E1487]]

achieve a 1-percent failure rate by 2005. I ask unanimous consent to 
insert a copy of Secretary Cohen's memo into the record at this time.
  Achieving a 1-percent failure rate requires the simple addition of a 
secondary fuse to blow up the cluster grenade or neutralize it should 
it fail to explode on impact. The technology to reach this goal is 
available, and the Army has already begun developing these new 
munitions. Yet, little funding has been allocated to expand this 
technology to all branches of military service. The bill before us 
today continues to shortchange this commitment. As a result, dangerous 
cluster bombs with high failure rates remain in use, with thousands 
more in military stockpiles. This leaves future families, soldiers and 
innocent children vulnerable to these hazards. Congress can and must do 
more.
  Today, I am calling on Congress to strengthen our commitment to our 
soldiers and civilians around the world from the danger of cluster 
bombs deployed by the U.S. military. It is our responsibility to 
support the Pentagon and our allies around the world who have sought to 
address this danger by ensuring cluster weapons are not deadly for 
years after their use. Reaching a 1-percent failure rate for cluster 
bombs is possible right now, but not without the full commitment of 
Congress. We have the will to enforce this goal--now we must have the 
way.
  I look forward to working with both Chairman Lewis and Ranking Member 
Murtha in the weeks and months ahead in addressing this critically 
important issue. I also ask unanimous consent to insert into the record 
at this time a recent article from Newday.com on cluster munitions.


                                     The Secretary of Defense,

                                 Washington, DC, January 10, 2001.
     Memorandum for the Secretaries of the Military Departments.
     Subject: DoD policy on submunition reliability (U).

       Submunition weapons employment in Southwest Asia and 
     Kosovo, and major theater war modeling, have revealed a 
     significant unexploded ordnance (UXO) concern. The following 
     establishes the Department's policy regarding submunition 
     weapons acquisition. The policy applies to systems delivered 
     by aircraft, cruise missiles, artillery, mortars, missiles, 
     tanks, rocket launchers, or naval guns that are designed to 
     attack landbased targets and that deploy payloads of 
     submunitions that detonate via target acquisition, impact, or 
     altitude, or self-destruct (or a combination thereof). It is 
     the policy of the DoD to reduce overall UXO through a process 
     of improvement in submunition system reliability-the desire 
     is to field future submunitions with a 99% or higher 
     functioning rate. Submunition functioning rates may be lower 
     under operational conditions due to environmental factors 
     such as terrain and -weather.
       Program Managers shall include the non-recurring cost of 
     increasing the overall functioning rate; the operational use 
     costs, including the cost of clearing UXO on test and 
     training ranges in accordance with DoD policy and operational 
     requirements; and disposal costs, as part of the life-cycle 
     costs of all future submunition weapons. The Program Manager 
     should establish submunition functioning thresholds and 
     objectives that advance the process of improvement in system 
     reliability, and that take into consideration the benefits 
     from reduced UXO (i.e., a cost-benefit analysis of increasing 
     the functioning rate (cost) and the resulting reduction in 
     UXO (benefit)).
       The Services may retain ``legacy'' submunitions until 
     employed or superseded by replacement systems in accordance 
     with the above policy. The designation ``legacy'' would apply 
     to submunition weapon acquisition programs reaching Milestone 
     III prior to the Fast Quarter of Fiscal Year 2005.
       The Services shall evaluate ``legacy'' submunition weapons 
     undergoing reprocurement, product improvement, or block 
     upgrades to determine whether modifications should be made to 
     bring them into compliance with the above policy.
       The Services shall design and procure all future 
     submunition weapons in compliance with the above policy. A 
     ``future'' submunition weapon is one that will reach 
     Milestone III in FY 2005 and beyond. Waivers to this policy 
     for future ACAT I and II submunition weapons programs, shall 
     require approval by the JROC.
       Thus policy applies to all acquisition category submunition 
     weapons programs. Compliance with this policy shall be 
     assessed by the Component or Defense Acquisition Executive, 
     as appropriate.
     William Cohen.
                                  ____


                   [From Newsday.com, June 23, 2003]

        Officials: Hundreds of Iraqis Killed By Faulty Grenades

                           (By Thomas Frank)

       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 [grenades] 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 Harried, 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 
     [grenades] 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

[[Page E1488]]

     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.''
       A Lingering Threat
       The war in Iraq is over, but the danger from the bombing 
     remains. Cluster bombs used by coalition forces showered wide 
     areas and their unexploded remnants pose a threat to Iraqi 
     citizens and U.S. forces.
       How They Work
       Most cluster munitions consist of four components:
       A dispenser, fins, internal fuses and bomblets.
       Dispenser is dropped from a warplane like a conventional 
     bomb.
       Dispenser is stabilized in flight by fin assemblies.
       Internal fuses trigger dispenser to open at a predetermined 
     height above the target.
       Dispenser spins and disperses bomblets to target.
       Bomblets float to target and detonate.
       However . . .
       Mechanical and fuse failures can leave some bomblets 
     unexploded. Their toy-like appearance can attract children, 
     with tragic results.
       What They're Used For
       Cluster bombs are designed to kill troops moving in the 
     open. The smaller explosions spread over acres can take out 
     large numbers of the enemy.
       The Bomblets
       The bomblets, or submunitions, can be designed for anti-
     personnel, anti-materiel, anti-tank or dual purposes. They 
     can be fin-guided or parachute-aided.
       Cluster bombs can be carried by bombers such as the Air 
     Force's B-52 Stratofortress.
       Some, shaped like tennis balls, can be 1.7 inches or 3.9 
     inches in diameter. Others are cylindrical.

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