Heavy Lifting
- Don Juice
- Apr 17, 2017
- 2 min read
The American military dropped a MOAB codenamed GBU-43 bomb against ISIS in Afghanistan which is the largest non-nuclear weapon for conventional warfare. Let’s talk about that bomb and why it was dropped. First off its nicknamed “Mother of all bombs” but the actual name is “Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb” and this thing is so huge and heavy that it has to be placed on a cargo plane before operation. It was also supposed to be used during the Iraq war 2003 but it was aborted. Now interesting enough, Russia in 2007 claimed to have tested the FOAB or “Father of all bombs” and they claimed it’s 4 times more powerful than the American one. But when I heard of the bomb yesterday going off, the first thing I thought about was The Battle of Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaida where we dropped the daisy cutters codenamed BLU-82 which is the predecessor to the MOAB. These bombs are different from thermobaric penetrator bombs with FAE (Fuel air Explosive) Capability which go deep beneath the earth to get at fortified bunkers or installations using weaponized air for fuel and sucking oxygen from the area. Unlike those, the bombs like the MOAB and the daisy cutters hit at surface to medium area elevation below targets covering large areas of land quickly, and it seems like they were effective for this operation. We used this against ISIS in Afghanistan killing 36-82 fighters and destroying tunnels at the base. America is going against ISIS very aggressively in Afghanistan with constant airstrikes and commando raids. This bombing showed that this relentless campaign will likely continue and is likely intensifying.
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