Since the weapon was made ready for use in 2003, the US has fought a lot of missions in densely populated urban areas and/or specifically targeting smaller enemy troop deployments. These two facts of the MOAB - that it’s delivered by a cargo plane and that it destroys stuff on the surface - explain why it’s not used very commonly by the US military. Structures that are a mile off, or three-quarters of a mile off, may not be destroyed based on how strong they are.” “That does not mean everything within a mile dies - it means that everything within a mile has a potential to be affected. “The blast radius goes up to a mile,” Farley explains. The MOP is designed to destroy hardened tunnels and bunkers, whereas the MOAB is designed to destroy buildings and things just below the surface, like caves. The MOAB is designed to destroy a lot of targets on the surface - unlike the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), the only US conventional bomb that’s larger than the MOAB (and one that has yet to be used in combat). Cargo planes are easier to hit with anti-aircraft missiles than bombers, which means the MOAB is inherently somewhat riskier to use than smaller bombs. It’s so big that it can’t be delivered by a normal bomber you need to put it in a cargo plane like the MC-130 in order to get it to a target. The MOAB is not only powerful but also extremely large in a physical sense. Why the US military would use a MOAB A smoke cloud created by a MOAB. But just because a larger-than-normal bomb was used here doesn’t mean there’s necessarily anything out of the ordinary. The fact that these questions remain unanswered, however, is normal at this point - they usually take a while to fully investigate, and we just heard about the bomb. Did the strike accomplish its objectives? Are the initial reports that there were no civilian casualties correct? Were the appropriate precautions taken to minimize the risks of the strike? Was the strike proportional to the threat, and did the value of the military target justify the risk of killing innocents? The more important questions here are the standard ones you should ask after any US airstrike. “But I’d suggest not jumping to conclusions about what this particular weapon means.” in the Trump administration to make basic tactical decisions that everyone sort of assumes something crazy and weird is going on,” says Rob Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies the Air Force. The speculation, in short, was way over the top. “This was another very, very successful mission.” “I don’t know if it this sends a message it doesn’t make any difference if it does or does not,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. Finally, Trump himself suggested it was not intended to send any kind of message. For another, the nature of ISIS’s presence in Afghanistan means that it actually kind of does make sense to use this bomb. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, specifically. There’s no reason to assume this was something out of the ordinary, even though the bomb was bigger than ones typically used by the US military.įor one thing, a general, not the president, appears to have made the call to use the bomb - Gen. Does this mean ISIS is a bigger threat in Afghanistan than we previously thought? Is this President Trump just following through on his campaign promise to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”? Is the Trump administration trying to send a signal to countries like North Korea and Iran that it means business?Īccording to experts on weapons and foreign policy, it seems this was a military decision, not a political one, based on the realities on the ground in Afghanistan right now. The obvious question, following such a high-profile show of strength, is what this means. 36 ISIS fighters were killed, according to the Afghan government, and the US military has not found any evidence of civilian casualties. The 11-ton weapon was first tested in 2003 but had never been used in combat prior to Thursday - when a US MC-130 aircraft dropped one on what it claims was a network of ISIS tunnels. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also called the “mother of all bombs” or MOAB for short, is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US military on the battlefield. The US military has just dropped a big bomb in Afghanistan.