Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interest as a serving TA officer. Indeed, my commanding officer commanded an MLRS battery that was designed to fire these weapons. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for introducing this important subject by means of a Private Member’s Bill. I have been coming under considerable pressure from a personal contact in the UNHCR, resulting from the indiscriminate use of these weapons in southern Lebanon, as described by many noble Lords. While cluster weapons are nasty weapons, there is no such thing as a nice lethal weapon. They can all kill, they can all maim, and they can all destroy the hopes and dreams of their victims, but I am not convinced that our Prime Minister understands that. Even the humble AK47 creates misery and fear all over the world. I have only one question, but it is a little technical. Does our current inventory of cluster munitions comply with the requirements of ““insensitive munitions””? Until recently, I slightly misunderstood the problem. For instance, it is thought that submunitions in Lebanon failed to explode because they were out of date or defective. I would be dismayed if any our weapons were either out of date—I have had a suitable response to a Parliamentary Question on that point—or unreliable. I think the Minister will struggle to convince your Lordships that our cluster munitions are reliable in that regard. The M26 MLRS rockets contain 644 M77 submunitions. After a short flight, the submunition is armed by a simple mechanism and when it hits a hard target it explodes. The hard target may be an armoured vehicle but if it hits any other hard surface—a rock or a vehicle—it will still explode. The problem, as identified by many noble Lords, is that if it gets stuck in a tree, lands in sand or lands in snow it will probably not explode. As there is no self-destruct facility—or, if there is one, it is unreliable—the submunition remains dangerous for a long time and, because the fuse mechanism is simple, it is very easy to set off. This causes all the problems so accurately described by noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, of course, is infinitely more knowledgeable about military matters than I am and he has described his difficulties with and reservations about cluster munitions. As noble Lords have pointed out, the UK did not deploy MLRS on Operation TELIC in Iraq in 2003. I was there. Of course, the reason we did not do so was because we had absolute air superiority. We could attrit the enemy by air and we did not want to litter the battlefield with any more unexploded ordnance than necessary for the reasons outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. Many noble Lords have remarked on our use of other cluster munitions in Iraq in 2003. I was one of the 25,000 British servicemen on the ground. If we had lost more than 1,000 British servicemen on that operation, I suggest your Lordships would be taking a rather different view. We believed that we faced weapons of mass destruction. We fought to win, not to lose. Do not send our Armed Forces on operations like this with one hand tied behind their back. If noble Lords do not like the consequences of an illegal and unnecessary war, I suggest they have a chat with the Prime Minister. Why the Israel Defense Force acted in Lebanon in the way it did is a mystery to me. What desired end-state could it have been seeking to achieve? I think part of its problem must have been poor command and control arrangements. Many noble Lords have questioned the utility of cluster munitions. It has been suggested that the bomblets are ineffective against the main battle tanks’ armour, especially if the tank has explosive-reactive armour. But, first, there are thousands of main battle tanks without ERA; and secondly, an armoured force has many more armoured vehicles than main battle tanks. In addition, it will have vast numbers of soft-skinned vehicles. Armoured personnel carriers are designed to resist small-arms fire and shrapnel from bombardment but, unless they are something like our in-service Warrior armoured personnel carrier, they are not designed to resist shaped charges. For instance, our most numerous armoured fighting vehicles are in the FV 430 range, which are easily taken out by a top attack bomblet. Many former Warsaw Pact AFVs are just as vulnerable. Noble Lords have observed that some countries have, to some extent, withdrawn cluster munitions or are debating doing so. But, to be quite blunt, many of these countries do not plan to prosecute and win a large-scale, high-intensity conflict. It is our Government’s policy to be able to do so. I suggest that those countries rely upon the US, UK and, possibly, France to do that task for them. Most of these states do not have a comprehensive and layered defence capability; their forces are unbalanced. I believe that there are 10,000 main battle tanks in Europe but states with far more main battle tanks than ourselves spend only a fraction of the UK’s defence expenditure. They have horrible gaps in their capability, particularly in logistics, their ability to deploy at distance, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance. In short, they are not serious and their conventional deterrent is weak. I believe that we need this capability to engage an advancing enemy armoured formation. Noble Lords have mentioned Kosovo, but in that campaign we saw the limitations of air power. Yes, a few platforms were taken out, but the Serb forces were much better than expected in camouflage, concealment and deception. Why we were deceived is another matter. We make a mistake by always assuming that we will have air superiority in a future conflict. Certainly that might be right in respect of a conflict of choice, but we might not have air superiority where an enemy has unexpectedly good air defences. However, if we are to have a system of cluster munitions, we must exercise great care in its use in order to follow the doctrine of General Rupert Smith in his excellent book Utility of Force. I am sorry to be unhelpful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, but I share all noble Lords’ concerns about unexploded submunitions—the ones that do not go off for the reasons I have explained. I believe that it is imperative that submunitions self-destruct quickly and reliably. This is for two reasons: first, on the humanitarian grounds already expertly laid out by noble Lords; and, secondly, for military effectiveness. The system would be much more effective if all submunitions exploded on contact with a hard surface or self-destructed within a few seconds. I cannot see any advantage in not having all submunitions exploding quickly after deployment. I think the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would agree on that point. Incidentally, I do not think that self-neutralisation is good enough because it would leave in place many of the problems I have outlined. There would be less military utility and it would provide a source of explosives for irregular forces or terrorists. Cluster munitions present a unique problem. Ordinary high-explosive shells and propellant natures can be used up on live-firing exercises—no doubt there is a cycle in the use of defence munitions to achieve that end—but, because of their nature, cluster munitions cannot be fired for training. It would be interesting to know whether cluster munitions have been fired recently on an MRS. So what is to be done? I believe that the Bill as drafted is undesirable, but easily amendable to permit cluster munitions with reliable self-destruct mechanisms. In the short term, the Minister should consider controls on cluster munitions, particularly a requirement for a written authority from the Secretary of State to remove cluster munitions from the ammunition depots. In the longer term, the Minister should ensure that all submunitions should self-destruct reliably. My fear—or, perhaps, forecast—as there are other uses for the MLRS launcher system, is that the Government will keep current stocks of cluster munitions for as long as possible until the political pressure becomes too much, and will then take the munitions out of service but will not replace them with munitions with a reliable self-destruct device because of the cost.