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Operational Use: GBU-43/B On Display at The,, - Note The

The MOAB is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat. It was first tested in 2003 at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. On April 13, 2017, the US military dropped a MOAB on an ISIL-K cave complex in Afghanistan, marking its first combat use. The blast killed 94 militants according to Afghan officials, though a local politician said it also killed a teacher and his son. While more powerful than the MOAB, the Soviet "Father of All Bombs" and retired US "T-12 Cloudmaker" bomb were never used in combat.

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56 views

Operational Use: GBU-43/B On Display at The,, - Note The

The MOAB is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat. It was first tested in 2003 at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. On April 13, 2017, the US military dropped a MOAB on an ISIL-K cave complex in Afghanistan, marking its first combat use. The blast killed 94 militants according to Afghan officials, though a local politician said it also killed a teacher and his son. While more powerful than the MOAB, the Soviet "Father of All Bombs" and retired US "T-12 Cloudmaker" bomb were never used in combat.

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ishandeep
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The basic operational concept bears some similarity to the BLU-82 Daisy Cutter, which was used to

clear heavily wooded areas in the Vietnam War. Decades later, the BLU-82 was used in Afghanistan
in November 2001[5] against the Taliban. Its success as a weapon of intimidation led to the decision
to develop the MOAB. Pentagon officials suggested MOAB might be used as an anti-personnel
weapon, as part of the "shock and awe" strategy integral to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[6]
GBU-43s are delivered from C-130 cargo planes, inside which they are carried on cradles resting on
airdrop platforms. The bombs are dropped by deploying drogue parachutes, which also extract the
cradle and platform from the aircraft. Shortly after launch, the drogues are released and bombs fall
unretarded. GPS satellite-guidance is used to guide bombs to their targets. [2]
The MOAB is not a penetrator weapon and is primarily an air burst ordnance intended for soft to
medium surface targets covering extended areas and targets in a contained environment such as a
deep canyon or within a cave system.[7] High altitude carpet-bombing with much smaller 230-to-910-
kilogram (500 to 2,000 lb) bombs delivered via heavy bombers such as the B-52, B-2, or the B-1 is
also highly effective at covering large areas.[8]
The MOAB is designed to be used against a specific target, and cannot by itself replicate the effects
of a typical heavy bomber mission. During the Vietnam War's Operation Arc Light program, for
example, the United States Air Force sent B-52s on well over 10,000 bombing raids, each usually
carried out by two groups of three aircraft. A typical mission dropped 168 tons of ordnance, pounding
an area 1.5 by 0.5 miles with an explosive force equivalent to 10 to 17 MOABs. [9][10][11]

GBU-43/B on display at the Air Force Armament Museum, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Note the grid fins.

MOAB was first tested with the explosive tritonal on 11 March 2003, on Range 70 located at Eglin Air
Force Base in Florida. It was tested again on 21 November 2003.[2]
Since 2003, 15 MOABs have been manufactured at the McAlester Army Ammunition
Plant in McAlester, Oklahoma.[12][13]
The Air Force has said the MOAB has a unit price of $170,000, but this is a historical unit cost
generated in the mid-2000s and various factors of the bomb's atypical development process have
made cost estimation difficult to precisely calculate. The Air Force Research Lab generated the
value based on already existing parts such as bomb casing and metals, and since the munition was
built in-house by the service they didn't pay for outside research or have standard procurement costs
associated with it. MOAB was a "crash project" developed for use against an adversary with
uncertain tactics on unfamiliar terrain, and so an effort to meet an urgent need and was not a formal
program. Should more bombs be ordered built, manufacturing would basically be started over with
higher costs because of lack of old parts, price inflation, and new design and testing. [14]

Operational use[edit]
Main article: 2017 Nangarhar airstrike
Video showing the bomb in use in April 2017

On 13 April 2017, a MOAB was dropped[15] on an ISIL-Khorasan cave complex in Achin


District, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. It was the first operational use of the bomb.[3][16][17] Two
days later, an Afghan army spokesman said that the strike killed 94 ISIS-K militants, including four
commanders, with no signs of civilian casualties.[18] However, a parliamentarian from Nangarhar
province, Esmatullah Shinwari, said the explosion killed a teacher and his young son. [19][20] Former US
military official Marc Garlasco, who served in the George W. Bush administration, said that the US
had not previously used the MOAB because of worries that it would inadvertently hurt or kill civilians.
[21]

Similar weapons[edit]
During World War II, Royal Air Force Bomber Command used the Grand Slam, officially known as
the "Bomb, Medium Capacity, 22,000 lb" 42 times. At 22,000 lbs total weight, these bombs were
technically larger than the MOAB. However, half their weight was due to the cast iron casing
necessary for penetrating hardened concrete roofs. The MOAB, in contrast, has a light 2,900 lb
aluminum casing surrounding 18,700 lbs of explosive Composition H-6 material.[22]
The United States Air Force's T-12 Cloudmaker 44,000-pound demolition bomb, developed
after World War II, carried a heavier explosive charge than the MOAB, but was never used in
combat.
In 2007, the Russian military announced that they had tested a thermobaric weapon nicknamed the
"Father of All Bombs" ("FOAB").[23] The weapon is claimed to be four times as powerful as the MOAB.
[24][2]

The MOAB is the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat as measured by the weight
of its explosive material.[25][26] The explosive yield is comparable to that of the smallest tactical nuclear
weapons, such as the Cold War-era American M-388 projectile fired by the portable Davy
Crockett recoilless gun. The M-388, a W54nuclear warhead variant, weighed less than 60 pounds. At
the projectile's lowest yield setting of 10 tons, roughly equivalent to a single MOAB, its explosive
force was only 1/144,000th (0.0007%) that of the Air Force's 1.44-megaton W49 warhead, a nuclear
weapon commonly found on American ICBMs from the early 1960s.

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