Textron's Cluster Bombs Are Anything But Ordinary

On Tuesday, defense and aerospace conglomerate Textron won an enormous $640.8 million contract modification, which expanded upon an existing firm-fixed-price contract to supply 1,300 cluster bombs to the U.S. Air Force.

As it stands, this formalizes a contract first announced in 2010, with at least some of those units to be used by the Royal Saudi Air Force.

As fellow Fool Rich Smith pointed out, this might seem troubling on the surface considering traditional cluster bombs are understandably frowned upon all around the world, thanks primarily to their generally wide-reaching, imprecise destructive effects that not only lead to greater-than-average civilian casualties but also tend to leave hard-to-find unexploded ordnance on the battlefield.

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