The true cost sometimes remained buried in far off battlefields.
Posted on 04/14/2017 9:31:50 AM PDT by marktwain
“Good.
http://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104614/massive-ordnance-penetrator/ takes you to the USAF fact sheet on the weapon—it is “Massive Ordinance Perpetrator (MOP), not MOAB.
Media gets it wrong again.”
I’m thinking maybe you got it wrong. The MOP and the MOAB are two different weapons. The MOP is the bunker-buster penetrating bomb. The MOAB is the air-burst bomb.
“The MOAB is just a really big fuel -air bomb ...”
It is not.
GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast munition contains a burster charge of 18,700 pounds of HE - a mix of RDX, TNT, and aluminum powder.
DOD conducted extensive experiments with fuel-air explosives (FAEs, aka thermobaric) but ultimately declined to procure any for combat employment. Reasons were not stated, but best guesses include reduced fire risk, reduced storage risk, better shelf life. Also, FAE detonation output is much tougher to predict: the tiniest variations in local air temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, incident sunlight (and perhaps other factors) have large and unforeseeable effects on explosive yield.
For sake of discussion, Imagine it did cost $13 million.
Still better than risking the life of even one of our soldiers.
Still better than risking the life of even one of our soldiers.
____________________________________________________________
All life is risk. The only time you are not at risk is when you are dead. You have to take cost into effect, or you can bankrupt and ruin the country to save a few lives, destroying far more than you save.
So war becomes a bunch of cost/benefit ratios. It would be silly to spend 13 million to reduce the risk to the life of one soldier the amount of smoking a cigarette or of driving a mile on a U.S. freeway.
It is a very difficult thing to do in practice. We tend to err on the side of spending more, but there are numerous examples where a couple of hundred dollars spent on some minor gear can substantially reduce risk.
For example, the U.S. Military refused to adopt optical sights for our rifles for decades after it was clear that they made our troops much more effective.
More effective troops reduce overall risk, because you do not have to field as many.
Every soldier, airman, sailor, and Marine want more resources devoted to them. Resources are finite, so choices have to be made.
” ... I do remember reading years ago that bunker buster bombs were going to be fashioned from the remaining inventory of battleship 16 in gun tubes. ...”
Could not have been done.
The barrels for the Mark 7 16 inch/50 caliber guns mounted on the Iowa-class battleships were constructed by a buildup process: they have many layers and are not solid steel. Furthermore, the heat treatment for artillery tubes is different from that required to produce an air-dropped penetrator munition case.
The GBU-28 penetrating bomb developed during Gulf War I was a 5000-pound class munition, with initial production made from inactivated 8-inch artillery tubes. Later inventory has been produced in custom foundries.
Most of the cost of such munitions (and of weapons and military systems generally) does not stem from the materials used: it comes from the engineering expertise required to design the stuff, and the skilled craftsmanship required to build it.
The true cost sometimes remained buried in far off battlefields.
"In August 1990, the U.S. military began planning an air offensive campaign against Iraq. Planners noticed that a few command and control bunkers in Baghdad were located deep underground to withstand heavy fire. Doubts were raised about the ability of the BLU-109/B to penetrate such fortified structures, so the USAF Air Armament Division at Eglin AFB, Florida was asked to create a weapon that could, and engineer Al Weimorts sketched improved BLU-109 variants. By January 1991, as the Persian Gulf War was well underway, it was determined that the BLU-109/B-equipped laser-guided bombs (LGB) would be unable to penetrate fortified bunkers deep underground.
The initial batch of GBU-28s was built from modified 8 inch/203 mm artillery barrels (principally from deactivated M110 howitzers), but later examples are purpose-built.
Also, from Google ..
After WWII many of the ships were decommissioned, the gun barrels were taken here to be buried in the sand for preservation. When President Bush was considering bombing the Iranian underground nuclear weapons facilities, it was discovered that we had no weapon capable of penetrating the deep multiple layered concrete Iranian bunkers.
The solution was to take these massive 16 inch gun barrels, fill them with high explosives, fit them with a depleted uranium nosecone and a global positioning system for precision guidance, and drop them on the bunkers from modified B-2 bombers. This improvised bomb was called the super bunker buster. In order to do this, selected B-2's had to be taken off their normal duty as nuclear bombers, their rotary bomb racks were removed and replaced with a special bomb rack capable of carrying the immense weight of these bombs.
Luckily, wiser thinking prevailed and the attack never took place, the current bunker buster bomb is made from an 8 inch artillery gun barrel, augmented with a rocket engine to drive it deep underground before exploding.
Thanks for your patience. Yes, I was posting fast and was confusing one mission/weapon with another.
(Did so because reports talked about using a weapon against buried tgts and the MOP would be used for that mission, not a MOAB. I’ll have to check with a few people I know and find out why the MOAB was used and not the MOP).
shhhhh don’t tell anyone, but we are saving MOPs for a fat kid.
The best way to lower the average cost of a MOAB, would be to use up more of them. They are cheaper by the dozen.
Love when they improvise.
The Air Force has come up with a figure: $170,000.
I consider my $200,000 estimate to be vindicated.
“The US’s Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb does not cost $314 million, or $16 million, but $170,000 a unit, the US Air Force told Business Insider on Friday.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/real-cost-of-moab-mother-of-all-bombs-170-000-2017-4
This MOAB bomb was estimated to carry 21,600 lbs of TNT. LINK
That is 10.53 tons of TNT. (1 ton = 2000 pounds)
Definition of a kiloton: LINK
The Hiroshima bomb was pegged at 15 thousand tons of TNT and the Nagasaki bomb was pegged at 21 thousand tons of TNT. LINK
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