…and sometimes its blows up in their faces as in the case of the USS Forrestal fire
Persons with Wernicke’s aphasia can produce many words and they often speak at a normal rate and prosody. However, often what they say doesn’t make a lot of sense. They may fail to realize that they are using the wrong words or using a non-existent word and often they are not fully aware that what they say doesn’t make sense.
$16,000,000 (plus cost of delivery) to kill 36 fighters out of a group of ~700 sounds like an insanely low ROI…
Nobody’s keeping score as a referee. “Whoops, Israel just carried out an airstrike on Hamas; that’s the 4,263rd time that Israel has resorted to violence, so make that 4,263 ‘loss’ points against Israel.”
You get into a thin end of the wedge argument. If it is OK for the US to nuke IS, then it is OK for Russia or China to nuke troublesome militants as well. And one person’s militant is another’s freedom fighter. How would India and Pakistan view things? India might feel that nuking Islamist militants is now defensible, and Pakistan might feel significantly less happy about exactly who is classified as one.
The other reason is that using nukes against IS would be no more productive than using the MOAB. You don’t attack an insurgent force spread across thousands of square miles with nukes. Using a nuke instead of the MOAB would just make a bigger hole. The people hiding in the caves can’t be made any deader.
A nuke is not a weapon suited to war in any sensible manner. They are vastly too powerful. Nobody has any idea how an escalating conflict where a nuke is used can be controlled. And the stakes are simply impossibly high. Do you feel lucky punk?
In a modern day conflict probably not really. If you looked at the total cost of the presence in Afghanistan versus the number of insurgents killed it probably comes up with a similar number (at least order of magnitude number.) $300 million to wipe IS out of Afghanistan? I doubt it could be done for that.
Is the MOAB a thermobaric bomb? Wiki seems to suggest it is, but the test footage on youtube doesn’t have the characteristic double wham that thermobaric weapons have as the fuel-air mix detonates.
Most all of the OPs posted by the OP are usually difficult to parse. I try but I don’t get it usually. -1 for me:(
Nope. The MOAB explodes tritonal, different kind of boom entirely. (I thought the MOAB was thermobaric until I looked it up yesterday.) The Russki’s Father of All Bombs, on the other hand is thermobaric.
Take notes; there will be a quiz.
Well, well, what do you know. Trump’s MOAB strike in Afghanistan was on fucking point. 36 ISIS foot soldiers were killed in the blast. Trump meant it when he said he would bomb the shit out of ISIS. 
Yes, who would have anticipated that a bomb capable of killing everyone within a mile of the blast would have managed to kill a small handful of people. It was truly a miracle of pinpoint logistics.
My guess is that the bunker buster would create severe but highly localized damage. This is great if you’re trying to destroy a specific hardened command bunker containing your enemy’s leadership/comm center, but when you’ve got fighters dispersed throughout a mountain valley, localization of bomb damage is undesirable.
With the MOAB’s airburst at a significant altitude above ground, you get a shock wave that hammers every tunnel in the valley. Tunnels at or near ground zero get destroyed, but even in tunnels farther away that don’t get crushed, the blast wave will be fatal to occupants. The Mach stem phenomenon is typically associated with nuclear airbursts, but presumably it’s also observed in non-nuclear airbursts like the MOAB.
The MOAB was closer to it’s expiration date. I believe it was the wrong decision, we all know things are usually just fine after that date.
(If the sides of the bomb were puffy, that’s a different story)
This ordinance is not that old. If it’s not stable enough to last a decade it’s not very useful. Within the last few years in training I blew up shaped charges produced in the late 1940s.
What would be the cost in lives to clear out those tunnels on foot?
Well, the other 600+ will never forget the experience. They may have auditory damage, PTSD, some other form of injury one way or another, and be, if nothing else, pretty demoralized. And if only 36 were in a place where bombs could have gotten them at all in the first place, then it’s a 100% kill effectiveness rate, and other bombs wouldn’t have done better.
India, Pakistan and Israel might have a little to say about it. And the Iranians might consider it somewhat hypocritical that the US is constantly demanding that they shut down their nuclear development when we’re the only country that can’t be trusted not to use its nukes.
Two false dilemmas in two successive posts…
Has anyone else noticed a large increase in idiots now claiming a MOAB is a type of nuclear weapon and thus the US is using “the same thing as chemical weapons”? They must have just seen the news titles of “Largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal” and missed a word.
/snip mine
But they could have done it cheaper. I mean, I love huge explosions just as much as the next person, but this just seems like a gross misuse of the biggest bastard we’ve got that doesn’t leave 100 square miles glowing.
A post without meaning. Please explain.