OPINION: Trump’s MOAB threat could put Iran’s deepest bunkers in US crosshairs
This is an excerpt from an opinion article by Dr. Rebecca Grant, vice president of the Lexington Institute.
Take President Donald Trump’s threat against MOAB seriously. The US Air Force’s GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast weapon, nicknamed the “mother of all bombs”, could feature prominently in any new air strike plans targeting Iran.
“The mother of all bombs is not nuclear,” Trump said. “It’s just an extremely big bomb. It’s like a small nuclear bomb, but the mother of all bombs is a big bomb, but it’s not nuclear.”
“I wouldn’t use nuclear power. We don’t have to,” Trump said.
He’s right. The United States has a range of precision weapons capable of eliminating any suspicious targets in Iran, including construction activities at Pickaxe Mountain. Admiral Bradley Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, has detailed knowledge of high-value Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps sites that could be targets for the MOAB.
President Trump has said he will not strike Iran until the midterms, but it is clear that he is reviewing Central Command’s strike briefing charts in great detail. And he wants Iran to know it. Here are four reasons why MOAB poses a formidable threat.
Trump ordered the first use of a MOAB in Afghanistan in April 2017
The MOAB was dropped on April 13, 2017 on a cave complex in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. “There was no surprise,” then-Defense Secretary James Mattis said of MOAB. “The battle was continuing and we were going to use what was necessary to break ISIS,” he added. Mattis said he wasn’t going to waste time “digging tunnels to count bodies”; CNN reported that 94 ISIS fighters were killed.
While American B-2, B-52 and B-1 bombers can easily carry the weight of 21,000 pounds. MOAB, the problem is the form. The MOAB used in 2017 was too large to fit on standard racks and rotary launchers in bomber weapons bays. For the Afghanistan mission, the MOAB was loaded onto a special cradle and slid off the rear ramp of an MC-130 in flight. Don’t worry about the MC-130s. Yes, the basic C-130 is a cargo plane, but Special Operations versions like the MC-130 are suited to clandestine missions. This is also where air dominance over Iran comes in handy. The first weeks of Operation Epic Fury destroyed Iran’s Russian-built integrated air defenses. Subsequent CENTCOM strikes prevented Iran from reconstituting its air defense. MC-130s on MOAB missions could also benefit from help from the Space Force, US Air Force and US Navy carrier-based aircraft for electronic warfare and other attack suppression, such as the EA-18G, F-35C and E-2D.
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