Take President Donald Trump’s threat on the MOAB seriously.The U.S.
Air Force’s GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast weapon, nicknamed the "mother of all bombs," could figure prominently in any new airstrike plans targeting Iran."The mother of all bombs is not nuclear," Trump said."This is just an extremely large bomb.
It’s like a tiny nuclear bomb, but the mother of all bombs is one big bomb, but it’s not nuclear.""I wouldn’t use nuclear.We don’t have to," Trump said.FRESH ACTIVITY EMERGES AT IRAN’S DEEPLY BURIED NUCLEAR SITE AS TRUMP WARNS IRAN NOT TO ‘GET CUTE’He’s right.
The U.S.has a range of precision weapons that can knock out any suspicious target in Iran, including the construction activity at Pickaxe mountain.
Admiral Bradley Cooper, Commander, United States Central Command, has detailed knowledge of high-value Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps sites that could be MOAB targets.President Trump has said he won’t strike Iran prior to the mid-terms, but clearly he is looking at Central Command’s strike briefing charts in great detail.And he wants Iran to know it.Here are four reasons the MOAB is a formidable threat.Trump ordered the first use of a MOAB in Afghanistan in April 2017The MOAB was dropped on April 13, 2017, on a cave complex in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.
"There was no surprise," then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis said of the MOAB."The battle was going on, and we were going to use what was necessary to break ISIS," he added.
Mattis said he wasn’t going to waste time "digging into tunnels to count bodies"; CNN reported 94 ISIS fighters killed.Too big for U.S.bombersWhile America’s B-2, B-52 and B-1 bombers can easily carry the weight of the 21,000-lb.
MOAB, the problem is the shape.The MOAB used in 2017 was too big to fit on the standard racks and rotary launchers in the bomber weapons bays.
For the Afghanistan mission, the MOAB was loaded on a special cradle and slid out of the back ramp of an MC-130 while ...