Monday, November 06, 2006

Wow! That's Alot O'Bombs!

The Red Cross demands that the use of cluster bombs be halted immediately, saying that the munitions are inaccurate and pose a lingering threat well after hostilities end. In truth there can be no doubt of this as the 142d Medical Company of Plainfield found out during the first Gulf War. While I agree that cluster bombs can be dangerous to non combatants, I question some of the numbers they use:
According to the NGO, between 95 and 98 percent of such munitions are neither reliable nor accurate, with anywhere from 10-40 percent of the so-called submunitions scattered by the mother bomb failing to explode, the ICRC said.
and

According to Handicap International, the Israelis used four million cluster bombs, of which up to 1.6 million failed to explode.
Four million cluster bombs? Million with a M. I find that very difficult to believe. Since a 500 pound bomb is about the smallest cluster bomb made, that would mean Israel dropped close to 2,000,000,000.00 pounds of munitions on Lebanon. Even if Handicap International meant to say pounds, that's still 8000 bombs, quite a bit for F-16s to carry at 16 per sortee.
Is this a clerical error, yet another example of civilians talking out their ass about weapons they don't understand or is it another NGO carrying water for the enemies of Israel?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it depends on anti-personnel vs. anti-tank. If they are counting each cluster one bomb could hold up to 2,000 little surprises.

That link for the Cindy Beaudoin incident seems to be either a very old account or a very sypmathetic version of the events.

El Duderino said...

I don't what they're counting, do you? That's kinda the point. I think you're right on both counts re the Cindy Beaudoin story. At the time there was so much CYA going on facts were hard to come by. Bottom line, poor Cindy was killed by either poor training, poor leadership or a combo of both although we may never know for sure.