This could be a reason to support cluster bombs.
Last edited Wed Feb 24, 2016, 08:49 AM - Edit history (1)
China has 6,635,000 active military personal in their army. If you don't think that would be a problem for us if they ever decided to invade the US then you are wrong. They have 750,000,000 of available people for their military while we have 145,215,000. That is 5 to 1. Would that happen, probably not. But we don't plan on probably not. So, yes, I think we should have cluster bombs. I also think we have misused them and that should be addressed.
Edit: I think cluster bombs are bad and that they should only be kept for defensive purposes and not used on other countries.
= new reply since forum marked as read
the real terrain is not. I think you lack knowledge about how armies move and are moved in the real world.
Oh, and BTW, I bet a dollar against a frosted donut that the Pentagon has contingency plans. It's what they do. It helps to plan ahead, and besides they have all those studi in the War Colleges with nothing to do but practice home work on plans like that.
But polish up your tinfoil hate.
global warming means that is going to change. As we all know, California's agriculture is in big trouble. Farm areas may eventually be able to shift, but it's also likely that increasingly erratic weather patterns, like very severe winters alternating with whatever, will make that... not exactly the simple solution some imagine. And there's always the problem of disappearing fresh water supplies.
Speaking of, probably nervous-type Canadians are starting to wonder if WE might someday invade. Or China! 
here and there than most threads. The theoretical idea of China invading is fun. Setting the question of what would be gained and, of course, our ferocious, enormous military aside ENTIRELY, there is no central government to take. The states would miss DC moving money around where needed, but they're basically independent, and we have a whole hierarchy of governments below those. They'd have to take the whole thing at once. Can't be fighting in the western states while our allies land forces on the east and southern coasts.
Seems to me our weak spot is, again, that almost no households can provide their own food, water, and heat against freezing. That's yoooge. But interrupting delivery practically obviates an invasion. Why bother when Chinese programmers could conceivably just do it from the comfort of their office cubicles? And why invade a nation putrid with hundreds of millions of rotting bodies? Again, to what purpose? Certainly any "invasion" at that point would be...surgical, to secure some resource that was wanted, and that any nation could do. Wouldn't take a China.
Hope this helps you feel better. 
There is that little issue of a Blue Water Navy, which is well beyond the issue of Why would they want to do that?
OMG! A billion Chinese with cluster bombs 
or am I wrong? 
isnt it a real enough threat to justify would-be WOLVERINES!!!!!!!!!!!! keeping AR-15s in their basements?
Oh thank God.
China's population situation is fascinating. Their unemployment rate, overall, is apparently already low. Their population is aging big time, though, something like 200 million right now (!) and soon to be 300 million, while their attempts to slow population growth mean relatively few young people entering the labor force. Japan's economy has been stagnating for years under the burden of its aging population.
The big threat from there that most observers see isn't invasion (America as a place to dump 200 million unneeded and needy elderly?) but that the roaring China engine that's been propelling the world's economy is going to slow dramatically.
A poisoned planet.
We really need new economic systems that don't depend on continual growth. And it looks like things might finally almost be bad enough to force it. Interesting for this discussion, here in the U.S. we have a candidate who supports socializing, and thus controlling, at least most of the means of production, with along with the profits (in addition to the risks we already shoulder). He's been soft pedaling all that, but if he lasts long enough the GOP can be counted on to open up discussion.
Period. 
The use of the bombs also violates American export law, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.
By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet
February 17, 2016
The HRW report tells a different story. “[P]hotographs taken by Human Rights Watch field investigators at one location and photographs received from another location show BLU-108 from separate attacks with their ‘skeets’ or submunitions still attached,” the investigation states. “This shows a failure to function as intended as the submunitions failed to disperse from the canister, or were dispersed but did not explode.”
Such failure, warns HRW, violates American export laws.
“First, U.S. export law prohibits recipients of cluster munitions from using them in populated areas, as the Saudi coalition has clearly been doing,” the report charges. “Second, U.S. export law only allows the transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of less than 1 percent. But it appears that Sensor Fuzed Weapons used in Yemen are not functioning in ways that meet that reliability standard.”
Full article: http://www.alternet.org/world/meet-american-firm-whose-internationally-banned-cluster-bombs-are-killing-civilians-yemen?akid=13985.44541.L7NAZd&rd=1&src=newsletter1050817&t=2
Study says almost all cluster bomb victims are children
By Kim Sengupta Thursday 2 November 2006
The study of 24 countries and regions by the humanitarian pressure group Handicap International showed that the weapons, still being used by government forces including those of the UK, have killed or maimed 11,044 people.
This is the first attempt to collate data about cluster-bomb victims worldwide, and it warns that under-reporting of cases in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam means the real figure could be almost 10 times higher.
Around 27 per cent of the victims were children, mainly boys who were working or playing in areas where the munition had been used.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/study-says-almost-all-cluster-bomb-victims-are-children-422743.html
Landmines and Cluster Bombs: "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Slow Motion"
Thursday, 01 September 2011 04:09
By H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout
Cluster bombs contain several dozen to thousands of bomblets or submunitions capable of injuring and killing people and shattering solid objects. They have been employed through air-dropping and ground-launching in astoundingly high numbers since the 1970's. Between 5 and 30 percent are duds and don't explode; of these unexploded submunitions scattered throughout conflict areas, about 50 percent detonate when jolted.[11] Cluster bombs, which are used as antipersonnel and anti-tank weapons, to wreck runway surfaces, destroy electric transmission lines, and for incendiary purposes, are particularly dangerous to civilians because of their wide target area - the size of a football field. Handicap International reported that 98 percent of more than 13,000 casualties from cluster munitions recorded with the organization are civilians, of which 27 percent are children returning home after conflict or doing normal daily tasks to survive.
Cluster bombs were initially developed and used by Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The United States undertook the first massive use of these munitions during the Vietnam War, inaugurating their extensive use in subsequent armed conflicts. Between 1961 and 1975, the United States dropped 1.5 million cluster bombs with 750 million bomblets in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, both as antipersonnel weapons and to deny Viet Cong access to areas. By 1975, 294 cluster munitions per square kilometer had been air-dropped in Vietnam - approximately two cluster submunitions per person.[12] During the Persian Gulf War of 1991, 60,000 cluster bombs with 30 million antipersonnel and antitank submunitions were dropped by the United States in Kuwait and Iraq over one month.[13] With flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law, the United States and British forces dropped cluster bombs in urban areas, including Baghdad, Basra, Hillah, Kirkuk, Mosul, and Nasiriyah, during March and April 2003 of the second Gulf war. The British group Landmine Action estimates that at least one million cluster submunitions were dropped by coalition forces in Iraq, leaving 50,000 live bomblets to maim and kill civilians, assuming a failure rate of five percent.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3001:landmines-and-cluster-bombs-weapons-of-mass-destruction-in-slow-motion
U.S. Shipping Thousands of Cluster Bombs to Saudis, Despite Global Ban - Foreign Policy
No doubt a humanitarian act.
http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/22/us_shipping_thousands_of_cluster_bombs_to_saudi_arabia_despite_international_ban
Cluster bombs are banned by 83 nations. The world recoiled in horror when it learned that Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad's forces have killed children with such weapons.
But that isn't stopping the U.S. military from selling $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, despite the near-universal revulsion at such weapons, and despite the fact that relations between the two countries haven't been entirely copacetic of late.
Cluster bombs spit out dozens, even hundreds, of micro-munitions in order cover a wide area with death and destruction. These weapons are used for killing large groups of people, destroying thinly-skinned vehicles and dispensing landmines or poison gas. Some of the Soviet-made incendiary cluster bombs used by Assad's forces during Syria's civil war are even designed to light buildings on fire and then explode after sitting on the ground for a while -- thereby killing anyone who gets close enough to try to extinguish the flames.
The irony of the U.S. selling one authoritarian Middle East country 1,300 cluster bombs while criticising the use of indiscriminate weapons by another isn't lost on the Cluster Munition Coalition, an international group dedicated to ending the use of such weapons.
"This transfer announcement comes at a time when Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have joined international condemnations of Syria's cluster bomb use," said Sarah Blakemore, director of the Cluster Munition Coalition, in a statement about the sale.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023594784
Cluster Bombs Are Not Good For Children, Hillary
An important post from 2008:
Voice for Peace
Cluster bombs are not good for children, Hillary.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x345179
RECOMMEND THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/13/7655 /
....
On September 6, 2006, a Senate bill–a simple amendment to ban the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas–presented Senator Clinton with a timely opportunity to protect the lives of children throughout the world.
The cluster bomb is one of the most hated and heinous weapons in modern war, and its primary victims are children.
Senator Obama voted for the amendment to ban cluster bombs. Senator Clinton, however, voted with the Republicans to kill the humanitarian bill, an amendment in accord with the Geneva Conventions, which already prohibit the use of indiscriminate weapons in populated areas.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6729667
According to article 17 of the treaty, the convention entered into force "on the first day of the sixth month after the month in which the thirtieth instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession has been deposited".[3] Since the thirtieth ratification was deposited during February 2010, the convention entered into force on 1 August 2010; by that point, 38 nations had ratified the treaty.
As the convention entered into force, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke of "not only the world's collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons, but also the power of collaboration among governments, civil society and the United Nations to change attitudes and policies on a threat faced by all humankind".[29] A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said "These weapons are a relic of the Cold War. They are a legacy that has to be eliminated because they increasingly won't work".[30] Nobel peace prize winner Jody Williams called the convention "the most important disarmament and humanitarian convention in over a decade".[30]
Anti-cluster munitions campaigners praised the rapid progress made in the adoption of the convention, and expressed hope that even non-signatories – such as the US, China and Russia – would be discouraged from using the weapons by the entry into force of the convention.[31] As one of the countries that did not ratify the treaty, the United States said that cluster bombs are a legal form of weapon, and that they had a "clear military utility in combat." It also said that compared to other types of weapons, cluster bombs are less harmful to civilians.[29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions
http://thewe.cc/thewei/_/images_4/us_terror_state__/girl_injured_by_us_bombing.jpe
...by a long stretch.
If you want to kill large numbers of humans, and not necessarily destroy the land, you need Neutron Bombs.
Easy-peasy.
Oh, and since voice inflection cannot be easily reproduced in a text conversation, the comment above is emphatic 
...I understand your OP to be advocating for the use of Cluster Bombs.
I responded by (sarcastically) suggesting, if we really want to defeat China's hypothetical invasion, we should put on our big boy pants and build an arsenal of Neutron Bombs.
I'm very sorry if the was too implicit and not overtly explicit.
DID WE LEARN NOTHING FROM THE TROJAN WAR?
