Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: How are unexploded cluster munitions not a solved problem? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/explainlikeimfive

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I really don't have a lot of background on cluster munitions; it only really came into my perception in response to the controversy over the US providing them to Ukraine. As I understand it, the controversy is because they often don't all explode reliably, and unexploded munitions can then explode months or years later when civilians are occupying the territory, making it similar to the problems caused by landmines.

In an age where things like location trackers, radio transmitters, and other such local and long-range technology to locate objects are common place, what's stopping the manufacturers of these munitions from simply putting some kind of device to facilitate tracking inside each individual explosive, to assist with detection and safe retrieval after a conflict? I get that nothing is a 100% effective solution, but it seems like it'd solve most of it.

Can someone with actual knowledge explain why this is still a problem we're having?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Military hardware is designed to be as simple as possible because military conditions are extremely unpredictable and messy.

Furthermore, war necessitates trimming everything that doesn’t involve killing the enemy out of one’s designs.

This is because unlike competition against nature — where requirements are finite — competition against another army means dealing with infinite requirements.

If one side builds cluster munitions that have these tracking transmitters, and the other side builds cluster munitions that don’t, then the latter is going to have more cluster munitions.

This may not seem like that big a deal because it would be a coincidence if the two were so evenly matched that the transmitters became the deciding factor.

But wat is not coincidental. War happens specifically when there is a specific set of conditions:

Side A might be able to dominate side B
But that is uncertain

If A >> B in terms of power, no war happens. Instead, A rules B.

If A == B in terms of power, no war happens. Instead, A and B trade.

War happens when A ~= B, ie when A believes it might be more powerful than B, but B also believes that A might be wrong.

So war has a built-in condition where the two powers are close enough in power that they both must give their all in order to win.

This means that hardware involved in war is subject to ultra-narrow design requirements in terms of efficiency.

And those ultra-narrow requirements mean you gotta trim everything that isn’t winning the war.

Another way to look at it is that war is the shortest-term form of human planning. Long-term planning during war takes energy away from the short-term planning required to win the war.

This is reflected individually in our own physiology, where readiness to fight is optimized for the moment, and causes damage long term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Wow, you're digging deep to come across this post a year later!

That said, thanks for the detailed explanation!