President Trump drops MOAB on Afghanistan, first ever combat use of weapon

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About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

28 Replies to “President Trump drops MOAB on Afghanistan, first ever combat use of weapon”

  1. That’s your professional level Whack-a-Moling right there. Like the Syrian missile event this was to show ragheads that there is a new Sheriff in town. Hopefully many wedding parties were minced and composted to fertilize the Poppy fields next year.

  3. So, Syria was all about Trump getting a 25 kill streak. I get it now.

    But seriously folks, nothing says, “human shields won’t help you ISIS turds” like a small scale nuclear-level explosion that has a one mile kill radius. All that was missing was the fallout.

    I’ll bet this was heard all the way in Pyongyang. [giggle]

    • Incidentally, two very important messages were sent. First, that hunkering down in a tunnel complex doesn’t do much to stop your lungs from getting sucked out of your body by the blast’s thermobaric effects.

      Equally important is that this happened in the frontier province of Nangahar. On both sides of the border, these regions have been home to some of the most hardcore Taliban elements. Killing hundreds (if not thousands) of them in a single attack is a message that is precisely calibrated to their level of understanding.

      • With an FAE bomb of that size going off the caves have collapsed and their leaders are now paste, things should quiet down in that region.

        • Exactol!

          The supposed security of deep cave complexes ain’t anywhere near as reassuring when they’re clogged with decomposing, inside-out bodies.

          Gruesome as it may sound, there are YUGE side-benefits from such a large scale, one-time, ground pounder. As in —

          1.) Mass Death: Although it may seem obvious, there are meaningful drops in overall morale, skill retention, ongoing recruiting, internal support, and so forth.

          2.) Major Setbacks: Especially upon the support infrastructure required to treat, heal, rehabilitate (or even just discreetly dispose of) so many mutilated bodies.

          3.) Funding Issues: Financing another room (or the labor needed) for your cave network is one thing. Excavating an entirely new underground complex (complete with HVAC, plumbing, telecom, IT, and mahogany paneling for the executive suites is another matter altogether.

          The +$70MM of cruise missiles in Syria didn’t have anywhere near the impact (so to speak) that just this one MOAB managed to attain.

          Did this attack have orders of magnitude more effect? Undoubtedly.

  4. US drops largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan after Green Beret killed

    The U.S. military dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, just days after a Green Beret was killed fighting ISIS there, a U.S. defense official confirmed to Fox News.

    The GBU-43B, a 21,000-pound conventional bomb, was dropped on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangarhar Province.

    The MOAB — Massive Ordinance Air Blast — is also known as the “Mother Of All bombs.” It was first tested in 2003, but hadn’t been used in combat before Thursday.

    The MOAB is so massive it had to be dropped out of the back of a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane.

    “We kicked it out the back door,” one U.S. official told Fox News.

    For comparison to the 21,000-pound MOAB, each Tomahawk cruise missile launched at a Syrian military air base last week was 1,000-pounds each.

    “As [ISIS’] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS].”

    The statement said U.S. forces took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties

    http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/13/us-drops-largest-non-nuclear-bomb-in-afghanistan-after-green-beret-killed.html

    • I’m glad to see the MOAB used. That’s the only way to take out Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment plant. It’s built under a mountain near Qom.

      • “I’m glad to see the MOAB used”

        Exactly, yucki. “Kind” or “unkind” simply doesn’t matter anymore.

        However sad, these matters will no longer be resolved with mere bullets.

        Please pardon me, but deterring raging anal sphincter cavities like Iran’s goat-fü¢king elite will not be obtained with let’s-play-nice measures.

        Only when their whole families, clans, and entire birthplace villages, or CITIES suddenly disappear will they ever sit up or take notice.

        Until then, all we have to look forward to is more of our precious, irreplaceable young women and men returning home without limbs or inside of pine boxes.

        Faced with that unspeakable alternative, a few dozen more MOABS, along with disappearing birthplace villages, or entire cities (e.g., like that of bin Laden supporter, mullah Omar, and his hometown of Khandahar) make ever increasing sense.

        I doubt that many European jihad victims would find some way to correct me.

        As always, I warmly welcome any and all cogent arguments against my stance. All I seek is a FREE WESTERN WORLD with a minimum of death. Anyone who has a better idea is sincerely invited to make a better case than mine.

  5. Drudge Link:
    “U.S. drops ‘mother of all bombs’ on ISIS: America’s most massive non-nuclear weapon is used for first time in combat on caves in Afghanistan”
    by David Martosko – April 13, 2017

    Excerpt:

    U.S. dropped its largest non-nuclear weapon after targeting ISIS in Afghanistan
    The GBU-43 bomb weighs 21,600 pounds, is 30 feet long, contains 11 tons of explosives and carries a mile-wide blast radius
    It can create a blast crater more than 300 meters wide after being dropped from a Hercules MC-130 cargo plane

      • EB-
        Thanks for introducing me to Jeffrey Nyquist’s website. Very astute analysis of Soviet-Russian strategy. Like Diana West, he nails the “commies amongst us”.

        His analysis of the Soviet/Russian role in the invention of the modern Middle East is consistent with the story emerging from archives of the era. These are the focus of intense study on the part of Russian-Israelis. When do “shocking revelations” cease to shock?

        Of course none will penetrate the politicized, indoctrinated faculty in today’s Mideast studies departments. Said’s ahistorical “Orientalism” not only remains unchallenged, but becomes increasingly grotesque with every petrodollar, Muslim Brotherhood adept distortion.

            • Thanks again.

              Frank Gaffney and Clare Lopez were briefly considered for a role in PDJT’s White House. Freaked out just the right people – their panic was mildly entertaining.

              No way such “fringe conspiracy nuts” could be placed in positions where they might disassemble the operative conspiracies! Too bad my high hopes were unrealistic.

              • I was hoping that Frank Gaffney, Clare Lopez, Phil Haney & John Guandolo would be part of Team Trump. I didn’t know that FG & CL were briefly considered. Freaked out just the wrong people, people like Grover Norquist and the MB, I bet. There loss and our loss. But it is early in Trump’s term so hopefully things will change.

  8. drop another one .. mebbe’.
    drop every bomb U got & then get the hell outta’ dodge ..

    • Just occurred to me:
      Those Hezbollah tunnels under the northern border are the scariest thing. Technology to neutralize them hasn’t advanced enough.

      If Israelis were evacuated from the Golan, it might be possible to MOAB the tunnels – and their occupants – to paste.

      0 wouldn’t sell Israel the weaponry because he didn’t want Iran hit. I wonder if PDJT would help out?

  10. April 13, 2017 2:50 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
    by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

    Obama Is America’s Version of Stanley Baldwin

    Both leaders put their successors in a dangerous geopolitical position.

    Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.”

    Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.

    Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s.

    Baldwin’s last tenure (1935–1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese Fascism.

    Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions.

    Baldwin assured Fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.

    Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.

    Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill, and concessions.

    Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naÏve efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid sh**” abroad.

    Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.

    Iran routinely threatened U.S. Navy ships, even taking ten American sailors into custody early last year. Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges. Iran was freed from crippling economic sanctions. And Iran quietly received $400 million in cash (in the dead of night) for the release of American hostages.

    All that can be said about the Iran deal is that Obama’s concessions likely ensured he would leave office with a non-nuclear Iran soon to get nuclear weapons on someone else’s watch.

    Obama green-lighted the Syrian disaster by issuing a red line over the use of chemical weapons and then not enforcing it. When Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad called Obama’s bluff, Obama did nothing other than call on Russian president Vladimir Putin to beg Assad to stop killing civilians with chemical weapons.

    Nearly five years after Obama issued his 2012 red line to Syria, and roughly a half-million dead later, Assad remains in power, some 2 million Middle Eastern refugees have overrun Europe, and Assad is still gassing his own citizens with the very chemical agents that the Obama administration had boasted were removed.

    Obama’s reset policy with Russia advanced the idea that George W. Bush had unduly polarized Putin by overreacting to Russian aggression in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. But Obama’s concessions and promises to be flexible helped turn a wary but opportunistic Putin into a bold aggressor, assured that he would never have to account for his belligerence.

    Middle Eastern terrorism? Obama assured us that al-Qaeda was “on the run” and that the Islamic State was a “jayvee” organization. His policy of dismissing the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” along with his administration’s weird assertions that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was “largely secular” and that “jihad” did not mean using force to spread Islam, earned the U.S. contempt instead of support.

    Russia and China launched cyberattacks on the U.S. without worry of consequences. Both countries increased their defense budgets while ours shrank. China built artificial island bases in the South China Sea to intimidate its neighbors, while Russia absorbed Crimea.

    North Korea built more and better missiles. Almost weekly, it threatened its neighbors and crowed that it would soon nuke its critics, the American West Coast included.

    In other words, as was true of Europe between 1933 and 1939, the world grew more dangerous and reached the brink of war. And like Stanley Baldwin, Obama was never willing to make a few unpopular decisions to rearm and face down aggressors in order not to be forced to make far more dangerous and unpopular decisions later on.

    Baldwin was popular when he left office, largely because he had proclaimed peace, but he had helped set the table for the inevitable conflict to be inherited by his successors, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.

    Obama likewise ignored rumbling volcanoes, and now they are erupting on his successor’s watch.

    In both cases, history was kind while Baldwin and Obama were in office — but not so after they left.

  11. I am surprised that CNN didn’t spin to sound like America dropped the bomb on freedom fighters.

    • That surprised me too, Dapto.
      Martin’s link to TRT video seemed kinda sympathetic to locals complaining about broken windows and such.

      92% of the world’s opium is grown in Afghanistan. They bag women and molest young boys and lifestock. I’ve no sympathy for civilians or freedom fighters in that particular hellhole. Nor do I feel hospitable to people from there.

      So there it is: I’m a hater.
      May as well put Yemen on my tab, while we’re at it.

  12. Here’s more about the MOAB. Note similarities to electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) weapons that detonate above the target.

    Here’s why the ‘mother of all bombs’ exploded 6 feet above its target in Afghanistan
    […]
    Why didn’t the MOAB strike the ground before detonating?

    The main attribute of the MOAB is that it causes overpressure….
    “Overpressure” is a term for the sharp spike in air pressure that a bomb causes. That change in pressure moves away from the bomb in a wave in all directions. Any mines, tunnels, or bodies caught in the blast would be unrecognizable after it passed.

    If the MOAB were to detonate on contact with the ground, a lot of that pressure wave would be sent into the dirt, digging out a small crater around the bomb. Dirt is a lot harder to move than air, so the energy wouldn’t travel far before petering out.

    Detonating a bomb of that scale on the ground would still do plenty of damage within a certain range, of course, but weapons engineers use physics to expand the reach of such bombs.

    When a bomb explodes in the air, the overpressure waves still spread out in all directions, including downward. But the downward-moving waves bounce when they strike the earth, flying back up through the hot region of thin air that the detonation created just moments earlier.

    In hot, thin air, pressure waves move faster. So the bounced waves can catch up with the ones created in the initial explosion as they spread outward and sideways above the ground. Those waves combine, forming a “mach stem” that can increase the initial force of the explosion by as much as a factor of two.

    That mach stem wildly expands the bomb’s kill zone and creates a larger downward force on the earth that can collapse tunnels and explode mines below the surface without wasting energy carving out craters.

    If this bomb had exploded somewhere flat, unlike the mountainous Nangarhar province, where the bomb was dropped, it would have created a blast radius a mile wide.

    MOABs are not the only explosives built to detonate in the air. Nuclear bombs are often built to explode miles, not feet, above their targets.

    It takes a lot of complex science to build machines this deadly.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/moab-airburst-bomb-explanation-2017-4

    • Thank you for the info, an interesting approach to a knotty problem.
      I wonder how ISIS will react? They can’t get any more brutal or insidious.