Ukrainians are now breaking down some of the U.S.-made cluster munition artillery shells they’ve recently received to repurpose the submunition bomblets they carry as improvised weapons to be air-dropped from small drones.

Ukraine had been trying to acquire and repurpose air-dropped U.S. cluster munitions to bolster and increase the effectiveness of their stocks of small munitions for drones. Dropping improvised bomblets from often off-the-shelf drones has been a hugely successful tactic for Ukrainian forces. At the same time, 155mm artillery rounds are in extremely high demand in Ukraine for use as designed.

Video footage of Ukrainian forces cutting apart an M483A1 155mm artillery shell, which is loaded with so-called Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM) submunitions, recently emerged on social media. It is unclear where or when it was shot, but some of the watermarks indicate that it shows personnel from a relatively well-known drone unit, nicknamed “Achilles,” assigned to the Ukrainain Army’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade.

Ukraine’s military began receiving M483A1 and M864 155mm DPICM artillery rounds from the United States in July. You can read more about these munitions in detail and why Ukrainian officials had been asking repeatedly for them here.

There are multiple different types of DPICM submunitions, also referred to officially as grenades, but they are all similar in form and function. Each one consists of a main body that contains a shaped charge intended to defeat armor – up to 2.75 inches of penetration against homogenous steel armor plate in the case of the grenades in the M483A1 – surrounded by a casing that is designed to send lethal fragments flying out in all directions. This combination of armor-piercing capability and the effects the fragments can have on unarmored targets is why the submunitions are referred to as dual-purpose.

The video from Ukraine shows individuals using an angle grinder to first saw off the front of the M483A1, before extracting the individual M42 and M46 submunitions inside. Each one of these shells contains 64 M42s and 24 M46s, or 88 in total. The main difference between the M42s and M46s is that the latter ones, which are found in the bottom rows in the shell, have a slightly heavier construction because of the increased force they experience during firing.

The footage from Ukraine showing the process of converting the M42/M46s into bomblets that drones can drop then shows personnel manually arming the fuzes on the submunitions by twisting a tassel-like piece of cloth on top of each one. When employed in the typical manner, this component would both arm the submunition and help stabilize it. When armed, the fuze just relies on momentum to send a firing pin into a detonator, which sets off the main charge.

After arming the DPICM submunitions, the Ukrainians insert a small pie