On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby stated that the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine is primarily motivated by inventory issues and a shortage of regular shells, not whether the cluster munitions are a helpful capability for Ukraine.
Guest co-host and CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly asked, “There [have] been kind of two rationales for it. One is the fight that the Ukrainians are now in, where Russians are very dug in across the front lines, these would be a helpful defense capability to have. The other is purely running out of — the defense industrial issues that the U.S. and its allies are having. Which is it? I’ve heard both as the explanation. Which is it?”
Kirby responded, “Well, it is actually both, Phil. But the prime driver right now is the inventory issue. The Ukrainians are literally in a gunfight. It’s an artillery fight and they’re trying to get through minefields while being shelled by the Russians. So, it is a very heavily dependent — it’s a heavily — it’s a fight that is heavily dependent on artillery and they are going through many thousands of rounds per day. And it’s difficult for the West to keep up with the artillery shell production that they need, what we call unitary shells, single explosive shells. And so, while we are ramping up our production of those shells — and we are — we aren’t where we want to be. So, as a bridge, so that they don’t run out of shells, so that they can continue to fight in this gunfight, we’re going to provide them with the bridging solution of some cluster munitions. Now, the cluster munitions do add some capability to them. They do allow them a little bit more flexibility in breaking through some of the Russian defenses. But the main reason is really to get us a bridge to a larger production rate of unitary normal artillery shells that they can continue to use in this counteroffensive.”
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