The sky over Tel Aviv looked fundamentally different last night. We have all become accustomed to the streaks of the Iron Dome interceptors and the single, massive booms of a successful hit on a unitary warhead, but the twentieth wave of Iranian strikes brought something far more haunting to our doorstep. It looked like a shimmering curtain of sparks descending through the clouds, followed by hundreds of smaller, rhythmic pops that sounded more like firecrackers or a heavy hailstorm than the heavy ordnance we have grown used to. It was a visual and auditory shift that signaled a terrifying new chapter in this escalation.
It is a sound and a sight that indicates a massive, calculated shift in the tactical landscape of this conflict. I am Herman Poppleberry, and we are diving deep into a very heavy, very technical topic today. We actually decided to pick this one ourselves because of the sheer volume of technical data and home front reports coming out of this latest escalation. Usually, we are responding to a specific question from our housemate Daniel, but today, the gravity of what we are seeing on the ground here in Israel demanded a dedicated, hour-long analysis. We are talking about the transition from precision strikes to area-denial warfare in a high-density urban environment.
Right, and it is not just about the spectacle. We are talking about the confirmed use of cluster submunitions in the heart of a major metropolitan area. This marks at least the second time we have seen definitive proof of these weapons being deployed in this specific conflict cycle, but the scale of the twentieth wave is unprecedented. It is a pivot away from the precision-strike doctrine we analyzed back in episode nine hundred twenty-nine, and it moves us into a realm where the goal is no longer just hitting a target, but rendering an entire city grid unusable.
That is right. When we looked at those earlier diagnostic strikes in episode nine hundred twenty-nine, the focus was on how Iran was testing the gaps in the radar and the response times of the Arrow three batteries. But with this twentieth wave, the intent has shifted from hitting a specific building or a specific coordinate to simply making a square kilometer of a city uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. It is a transition from surgical strikes to saturation, and the humanitarian, economic, and operational implications are staggering. We are seeing the Ring of Fire doctrine we discussed in episode nine hundred forty-five evolve into something much more persistent and much more difficult to clean up.
So, before we get into the ballistic trajectories and the specific Iranian delivery systems, we need to talk about the legal and international framework surrounding these weapons. Specifically, the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Herman, this is a treaty that has been around for nearly two decades, but the list of people who have not signed it is just as telling as the list of people who have. It really highlights the friction between international humanitarian ideals and the cold reality of national security.
It is a complex and often frustrating piece of international law, Corn. The Convention on Cluster Munitions, or the C-C-M, was adopted in Dublin back in May of two thousand eight and entered into force in August of two thousand ten. As of today, in early March of twenty-six, there are one hundred twelve countries that have ratified it. The core of the treaty is a categorical ban on the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions. The reasoning is purely humanitarian and based on decades of data from conflicts in Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East. These weapons are notorious for two things: their wide-area footprint, which makes them inherently indiscriminate in urban settings, and their high dud rate.
And that dud rate is the real killer, right? Because a submunition that does not explode on impact effectively becomes a landmine that sits on a sidewalk, a rooftop, or inside a ventilation shaft until someone accidentally triggers it days, weeks, or even years later. It turns a temporary strike into a permanent hazard.
Precisely. The humanitarian argument is that these are persistent threats to civilians long after the sirens stop and the peace treaties are signed. However, when you look at the map of who has ratified the treaty, you see some massive, glaring gaps. Most notably, the United States, Israel, Russia, China, and Iran are not parties to the convention. And their reasons, while different in political tone, share a common thread of military necessity. They argue that in a peer-to-peer or high-intensity conflict, cluster munitions provide a tactical advantage that cannot be replicated by unitary warheads.
Let us start with the American and Israeli perspective, because it often comes down to the concept of strategic depth and the reality of modern conventional warfare. From a conservative military perspective, cluster munitions are seen as a vital tool for stopping massed armor or infantry advances. If you are facing a massive conventional force crossing a border, a single cluster warhead can do the work of dozens of unitary shells. It is about efficiency on the battlefield.
Right. The argument from the Pentagon and the Israeli Defense Forces has long been that these weapons provide a unique capability for area denial and suppressing enemy fire. They argue that if you ban them entirely, you are forcing your military to use more ordnance and take more risks to achieve the same tactical effect. There is also the technical argument regarding reliability. The United States has invested billions in self-destruct mechanisms for submunitions, trying to bring that dud rate down to less than one percent. They argue that if the weapon is reliable and cleans itself up, the humanitarian concern is mitigated. But as we have seen in recent conflicts, that one percent is often an optimistic laboratory figure that does not survive the reality of being fired from a rocket at Mach six.
But of course, the critics say that in the heat of battle, one percent of several thousand submunitions is still dozens of unexploded bombs in a neighborhood. Now, what about the Iranian side? Because they are the ones actually firing these things into Tel Aviv right now. They obviously have no interest in the convention, but their logic seems less about stopping tanks and more about psychological warfare and overwhelming civil defense. They are using the stigmatized nature of the weapon as a feature, not a bug.
Iran sees cluster munitions as a way to bypass the economic and technical advantages of the Iron Dome and David’s Sling. It is a simple mathematical problem. If you fire a single ballistic missile with a unitary warhead, the interceptor has one target. If that missile splits into two hundred submunitions at an altitude of five kilometers, the interceptor might get the bus, which is the carrier vehicle, but it might not get all the passengers. It forces the defense system into a saturation dilemma. Do you expend a hundred-thousand-dollar Tamir interceptor on a submunition the size of a soda can? If you do, you run out of interceptors in minutes. If you do not, the city gets peppered.
It is a grim calculation. And it brings us to the technical side of how they are actually doing this. We have talked about the Kheibar Shekan and the Fattah series in the past, specifically in episode nine hundred eighteen when we discussed solid fuel and strategic depth. Which of these Iranian rockets are we seeing equipped with these cluster warheads in this twentieth wave? Is this a new modification or something they have had in the shed for a while?
Based on the debris patterns and the telemetry we are seeing from open-source intelligence reports, it looks like a mix of old and new. The Kheibar Shekan is a primary candidate because of its high maneuverability and its ability to carry a modular payload. It is a solid-fuel missile with a range of about fourteen hundred kilometers, and its reentry vehicle is designed to be swapped out. But we are also seeing evidence of submunition buses being integrated into the older Shahab-three variants and even some of the medium-range rockets used by proxies. The most concerning development is the potential for cluster payloads on the Fattah-one hypersonic missiles. If you combine hypersonic speed with a cluster dispersal, you are looking at a weapon that is almost impossible to intercept cleanly.
So, how does it actually work in flight? At what point does the missile stop being a single object and start being a cloud of submunitions? Because that height of burst seems like the most important variable for how much damage is done on the ground.
That is the height of burst, or the H-O-B, and it is a critical variable that the Iranian engineers are likely tweaking with every wave. For an urban area like Tel Aviv, the Iranians seem to be setting the dispersal altitude relatively high, likely between three and five kilometers. The higher the dispersal, the wider the footprint. If you release them too low, you get a dense, lethal cluster in a small area, maybe a single city block. If you release them higher, you cover multiple city blocks with a lower density of submunitions, but you maximize the disruption to the city's infrastructure.
And the physics of that dispersal is terrifying. You have these canisters, often called the bus, which use a small explosive charge or a mechanical centrifugal force to eject the submunitions. Each submunition might have its own little ribbon or parachute to stabilize it so it falls nose-down. This is crucial because many of them use a shaped charge to penetrate armor or a pre-fragmented shell to maximize anti-personnel lethality. When you see those ribbons in the sky, you are looking at the stabilization system of a weapon designed to kill.
And that is where the tactical logic gets really dark, Corn. When you use these against a military base, you are trying to destroy aircraft on a runway or take out a radar array. But when you deploy these over a residential neighborhood, the goal is not to destroy a specific building. The goal is to turn the entire environment into a hazard. It shuts down the economy, it prevents emergency services from moving, and it creates a persistent state of terror. It is area denial in the most literal sense. You are denying the civilians the right to use their own streets.
It reminds me of what we discussed in episode nine hundred forty-five regarding the Ring of Fire and Iran’s new strike doctrine. They are moving away from the idea of winning a quick victory and moving toward a strategy of exhaustion. If every time there is a missile warning, the people in Tel Aviv have to worry not just about the impact, but about the thousands of tiny mines left behind, the psychological toll is exponential. It changes the nature of the all clear signal.
It really does. It creates an urban minefield. And that brings us to the reality on the ground here in Israel. The Home Front Command has been incredibly proactive, but the challenge they are facing with this twentieth wave is unprecedented. They have been issuing these visual aids, basically infographics on every phone and television screen, showing people what to look for. They are trying to turn every citizen into a passive observer who can report these items without touching them.
I saw those infographics. They look like little yellow or black cylinders, sometimes with a nylon ribbon attached, sometimes looking like a heavy-duty battery or a piece of plumbing. The message is very clear: do not touch, do not approach, and do not even try to cover them with a bucket or something. People think they are being helpful by marking them, but even the act of placing a cone near one can be dangerous if the submunition is unstable.
You've hit on the core issue there. People think they are being helpful by putting a bucket over it to protect others, but these things are incredibly sensitive. Some use a simple impact fuse, but others can have tilt sensors or even magnetic sensors. If you move a metal bucket near a submunition with a magnetic sensor, it could detonate. And the lethality does not degrade quickly. A submunition can sit in a gutter for five years and be just as deadly as the day it fell. We are still finding unexploded submunitions in southern Lebanon from the conflict back in two thousand six. That is twenty years of a landscape being poisoned by unexploded ordnance.
So let us talk about the clearance process. If a single missile drops two hundred submunitions over a four-block radius in a city like Tel Aviv, how does the government actually go about making that area safe again? It is not like a battlefield where you can just cordon it off and wait for the engineers. People live there. People need to get to work. Hospitals need to function.
This is one of the most complex tasks an Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or E-O-D, team can face. In a rural area, you can use flails or controlled burns to clear a field. In a city, it is a painstaking, grid-by-grid manual search. They start by using drones equipped with high-resolution thermal and optical cameras to map the dispersal pattern immediately after the strike. If they know where the bus opened and they know the wind speed at that altitude, they can predict the footprint with some accuracy.
But submunitions are notoriously unpredictable. They are light, they have ribbons, and they catch the wind. They can bounce off a roof, slide down a drainpipe, or get caught in the branches of a tree in a public park. You could have one on a balcony on the twelfth floor and another in a basement window well.
That is the nightmare scenario. You can clear the street, but if there is one hanging in a palm tree over a playground, you have a ticking time bomb. The Israeli E-O-D teams are using a combination of specialized robotics and manual technicians. They literally have to walk the grid. They check rooftops, balconies, window ledges, and every square meter of pavement. They use ground-penetrating radar in some cases to see if any have buried themselves in soft soil or sandboxes. It is a slow, methodical process that can take days for just a single neighborhood.
And what do they do when they find one? I assume they do not just pick it up and put it in a truck. That seems like a recipe for disaster.
Almost never. The standard protocol is blow in place. They place a small donor charge next to the submunition and trigger a controlled explosion. But think about what that means in a city. You find a submunition on someone’s third-floor balcony or inside a parked car. To make it safe, you have to blow it up right there, which means you are potentially damaging the building or the vehicle you are trying to save. It is a slow, destructive, and incredibly expensive process. The secondary damage from the clearance can sometimes be worse than the initial strike.
It makes you realize why the international community is so adamant about the ban. Even if you are pro-military and you understand the utility of these weapons in a desert tank battle, the long-term cost of clearing an urban center is just astronomical. It is not just the E-O-D hours; it is the lost economic activity while those blocks are closed. It is the insurance claims. It is the psychological trauma of hearing controlled explosions in your neighborhood for a week after the war has supposedly paused.
And there is the question of accountability and certainty. How do you ever know you got them all? You can clear a street ten times, but then a heavy rainstorm washes one out of a gutter and into the middle of the road. The Home Front Command has to maintain a permanent database of every strike zone, and those zones remain under a shadow for a long time. They have to tell residents that even after the clearance, they need to remain vigilant for years. It changes the way people interact with their environment. You stop letting your kids play in the grass. You stop reaching into bushes to grab a lost ball.
It is a total transformation of what we think of as civil defense. We used to think that once the sirens stopped and the fire was out, the danger was over. Now, the danger is just beginning when the sirens stop. It is a persistent, low-level threat that grinds down the resilience of a population.
It really highlights the disparity in how this conflict is being fought. You have Israel using incredibly expensive, precise interceptors to try and minimize any damage, and you have Iran using relatively cheap, mass-produced cluster munitions to create the maximum amount of long-term chaos. It is a classic asymmetric strategy, and as we saw in the twentieth wave, it is one they are leaning into more heavily as the conflict progresses. They are betting that the social and economic cost of the cleanup will eventually break the Israeli will to continue.
You know, it also brings up a notable point about the double standards we often see in international discourse. You have these one hundred twelve nations that have signed the C-C-M, and they are often very vocal about condemning the use of these weapons. But when a country like Israel is facing a direct existential threat and an adversary that is intentionally using banned weapons against its civilians, the diplomatic conversation gets very complicated very quickly. The security justification for not signing the treaty starts to look very different when you are the one being targeted.
It does. There is a tendency in some international circles to treat all cluster munition use as equally reprehensible, regardless of whether it is being used in self-defense against an invading army or as an offensive tool of terror against a city. But from a conservative perspective, the focus has to remain on the intent and the target. If the intent is to saturate a civilian population center with unexploded ordnance, that is a clear violation of the laws of armed conflict, specifically the principle of distinction, regardless of whether you signed the C-C-M or not.
Right, because the laws of armed conflict already prohibit indiscriminate attacks on civilians. You do not need a specific treaty on cluster munitions to know that firing hundreds of tiny bombs into a residential neighborhood is a war crime. The treaty just makes the hardware itself the focus, but the underlying illegality of the act remains.
That's the crux of it. And for the United States and Israel, the refusal to sign is not about wanting to target civilians; it is about maintaining a conventional deterrent against massed military forces. They want the option to use these weapons against a tank division in the desert. But when an adversary like Iran uses that same hardware in a way that is purely punitive and terroristic, it muddies the water for everyone. It makes it harder to defend the legitimate military use of the technology because the public only sees the horrific civilian aftermath.
It is a mess, both legally and literally on the ground. I want to go back to the technical side for a second. You mentioned the Fattah series earlier. These are Iran’s hypersonic missiles. If they start putting cluster warheads on hypersonic delivery vehicles, does that change the interception game even further? Does the speed of the bus affect how the submunitions disperse?
It makes it almost impossible for current-generation systems to guarantee a clean kill. If a missile is traveling at Mach five or Mach ten and it deploys its submunitions, the kinetic energy involved is massive. Even if you hit the bus with an interceptor, the submunitions are still traveling at hypersonic speeds. They become kinetic penetrators even if they do not explode. They could punch through a roof just by virtue of their velocity. We are seeing a real-time evolution of strike packages that are designed specifically to defeat the most advanced missile defenses in the world. It is an arms race between precision defense and saturation offense.
It really underscores what we talked about in episode nine hundred forty-one, when we looked at the missile frontiers of Hezbollah and the Houthis. This technology trickles down. If Iran is perfecting these cluster delivery systems, it is only a matter of time before we see them in the hands of their proxies closer to our borders. Imagine a shorter-range rocket from Lebanon carrying fifty submunitions. The flight time is so short that the E-O-D teams would be starting their work before the dust has even settled from the launch.
And that is the real long-term threat. A cluster munition fired from Lebanon into northern Israel has a much shorter flight time, which means even less time for civilians to seek cover. The density of the submunition cloud would be even higher because the bus wouldn't have as much time to drift. We are looking at a future where the entire border region could become a permanent unexploded ordnance zone.
So, for the people listening who might be in these areas, or who have family here, what is the practical takeaway? Beyond the don't touch rule, what is the reality of living in a city that has been clustered? How do you even explain this to a child?
The reality is a total change in daily behavior. You stop taking shortcuts through empty lots. You teach your children that anything shiny, unusual, or toy-like on the ground is a mortal threat. You become an amateur E-O-D spotter. And you have to accept that the all clear signal from the Home Front Command is now a relative term. It means the immediate threat of more missiles is over, but it does not mean the ground is safe. It means you can come out of the shelter, but you must stay on the paved, cleared roads.
It is a sobering thought. We are looking at the creation of urban minefields in one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. It is a collision of medieval-style area denial and twenty-first-century ballistic technology. It is high-tech terror using low-tech persistence.
And it is not going away. This twentieth wave was a proof of concept. They saw that they could get submunitions onto the ground in Tel Aviv despite the most dense air defense network on the planet. They saw the chaos it caused. They saw the E-O-D teams struggling to clear the streets. From their perspective, it was a resounding success. So we have to assume the twenty-first wave and the twenty-second wave will refine this even further. Maybe they will use different types of submunitions, maybe some designed specifically to look like everyday objects, which is a tactic we have seen in other conflicts like the one in Ukraine.
That is a terrifying prospect—the idea of booby-trapped submunitions designed to look like flashlights or toys. But it is why we do this show, to look past the headlines and understand the actual mechanics of what is happening. It is not just missiles were fired. It is a specific type of ordnance was deployed with a specific long-term goal of social and economic disruption. We have to understand the weapon to understand the strategy.
Well said, Corn. It is about understanding the doctrine, not just the drama. And as we continue to track these developments, we will keep looking at those technical shifts, because that is where the real story of this conflict is being written. The engineers in Tehran are watching our response just as closely as we are watching their launches.
I agree. And for those of you who want to dive deeper into the history of these Iranian systems, I really recommend going back to episode nine hundred eighteen where Herman breaks down the move to solid fuel. It explains a lot about why these missiles are so much harder to stop before they launch, which is the only way to truly prevent a cluster dispersal.
And episode nine hundred twenty-nine is essential for understanding how they went from the diagnostic strikes to the saturation strikes we are seeing now. It is a clear, documented progression from testing the fences to trying to knock the whole house down.
Well, this has been a heavy one, but an important one. We are living through a shift in the nature of urban warfare, and it is happening right outside our windows. The weird prompts we are getting lately are becoming increasingly grounded in a very harsh reality.
It certainly is. And hey, if you are finding these deep dives helpful, please do take a moment to leave us a review on Spotify or your podcast app. It really helps the show reach more people who are looking for this kind of technical analysis rather than just the usual surface-level reporting you see on the nightly news.
Yeah, we appreciate the support from our regular listeners. You can find all our past episodes and a way to get in touch with us at our website, myweirdprompts.com. We are also on Spotify, of course, where you can follow the show to get notified the second a new analysis drops.
Thanks for joining us today. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and most importantly, stay off the grass until the E-O-D teams give the word. We will talk to you in the next one.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Until next time.
