Last things first....
You are talking about things you have no clue about.
Is that so?
I was the primary artillery instructor at The Basic School in Quantico for years, teaching newly commissioned officers about the use of artillery in accordance with Marine and Army artillery doctrine. I'm also a combat veteran artillery officer who literally game the fire orders for different rounds in combat, I know what our daily loads were for combat, how much of various ammunition types we received, and their effectiveness. I've got a nephew and a cousin who are both artillery officers, so we have these kind of discussions all the time on current developments, etc..
What's your background?
DPCIM isn't our primary round. We aren't sending them "older HE" we're sending them HE that we need for current front line forces.
I never said that it
is. I said that it
was, for a very long time, because it was the most effective round that we had. We moved away from using them in the 2000's because 1) they have a higher dude rate and are more likely to cause civilian casualties when used in urban areas, which is where more of the fighting was concentrated, and 2) political pressures against using "cluster munitions" because of the potential from civilian casualties. But that didn't change the reality that they were still the most effective general purpose round in our artillery arsenal, that we kept millions of them in storage, and that our developmental/procurement efforts are focused on trying to produce DPICM successor rounds with a lower failure rate.
So, while we moved towards production and use of HE rounds over DPICM because of those political considerations, the general tactical superiority of DPICM/submunition rounds over generic HE rounds is not up for serious debate. Any professional artilleryman knows that to be the case.
Why else do you think the United States didn't sign the convention against cluster munitions such as DPICM rounds? If HE rounds are truly equal to or even superior to DPICM, and they are of course much cheaper, why
wouldn't we sign it?
Which leads to the point that if we got in a real conventional shooting war, where large scale artillery support was required in our direct national interest, we'd have been firing off DPICM like it was going out of style. Because that's what you use for maximum tactical effectiveness.
What is really needed for our national security isn't more HE rounds - except for a few mission-specific types -- , but an acceleration of the M999 and C-DAEM/XM10278 projects to get more submunition ammo out there as our basic combat round. And if burning through the less effective HE gets us to that point faster, I'm all for it.