I suspect the real issue is stealth, not payload capacity or configuration.
Fighter escort isn’t going to be much good against surface to air missiles.
Actually, they are pretty helpful with that:
You want to do that before you send the bomber in, though, not while escorting it.
SEAD often occurs concurrently with a bomber or ground attack mission because it isn’t always possible to identify specific locations for mobile anti-aircraft defenses. However, sending fighters to ‘escort’ bombers is a WWII-era tactic that doesn’t have much applicability today because most air combat is air-to-air missile exchange. This is why the focus to day is in achieving air superiority (assuring no counterforce by opposing air forces) and stealth (avoiding detection or at least discrimination).
Stranger
I would also note that SEAD isn’t so much a fighter mission (shoot the missiles down after they’ve been launched) as an attack (hit the launch sites ASAP after they come online) and electronic warfare mission.
Probably the overriding problem with the US dropping a MOP is the B2. The US has 19 operational B2s. That’s it. Current value is about $4 billion each. This places them well into the too valuable to use category.
Whilst the capability is no doubt remarkable, and the stealthy profile very good, how much are you willing to bet? No stealth aircraft is fully stealthy from every angle.
The problem any mission to bomb the Iranian bunker has is that, as noted above, it is known to be the single most important target. Surprise isn’t part of the equation. The political value to the Iranian regime from downing a B2 would be stratospheric. And the fallout for the US leadership equally so.
Overall there is no real upside to such a mission. With a small, but non zero, chance of extraordinarily bad outcomes.
The B-2 has already been used in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. The bombs that accidentally hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 were dropped by a B-2.
Considering that Iranian control of their own airspace is so poor that the Israelis have been operating at will from the start of hostilities almost without loss (they admit to a single drone having been shot down by a surface to air missile) using less stealthy aircraft than the B-2, I can’t see Iranian air defenses being a serious consideration for keeping the B-2 from being used.
I agree - this would be a weapon of last resort, not unlike using an actual nuclear explosive weapon. As a result, it would be used only in retaliation or when the regime is on its last gasps. (That “ordering non-existent battalions to defend Berlin” phase) That latter situation has to be one the Israelis planned for, assuming they actually thought through an attack plan when they have no hope of getting the main nuclear facility with their weapons. Their current plan seems to be “trigger enough of a response to get the USA involved”.
Well, it’s a mission that’s usually carried out by planes that are labeled as “fighters”.
At least part of that is because fighter pilots are considered higher prestige than pilots of other sorts of planes, and so there’s an incentive to call planes fighter planes rather than attack planes, even if ground-attack is the plane’s primary purpose.
I remember an older version of the Bunker Buster was used against the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan.
They had limited success.
Apparently the MOP is supposed to be more powerful.
There’s a big difference in bombing a mountain made of solid rock, compared to a concrete bunker buried deep underground.
There is a nice article (gift link) with graphical elements explaining how this bomb (or a series of them, sent down the same hole) might be able to destroy the complex.
The U.S. military has concluded that one bomb would not destroy the Fordo facility on its own. To destroy the site, an attack would have to come in waves, with bombers releasing one after another down the same hole.
Or they could target a thermal exhaust port.
What I found on Wikipedia is:
All the sources that I find are this vague. It implies that size and weight are the issues, but I have trouble believing that’s all it is, since obviously a C-130J and probably a number of other cargo aircraft could transport it.
I still think it’s something about how it’s mounted and commanded for release. This is not the sort of weapon that you slide onto a pickatinny rail or load it on a pallet and shove it out the back of the cargo bay. It would need some forethought and serious modification.
Also, as someone pointed out, dropping this thing out the back of a cargo plane could present some pretty serious center-of-gravity issues.
Edited to add: found this pic on Wikipedia of a B-52 releasing a MOP during a test. Not a B-2. So this would definitely support the idea that it’s not just the B-2 that can carry or release this weapon. However that’s a test, we don’t really know if that configuration is adequate to deploy in combat. I’m sure if all the B-2s were somehow grounded, it could be figured out fairly quickly for the other aircraft, but the B-2 was specifically designed to carry the MOP.
How long can the C-130 fly in a zero-g parabolic arc, like the Vomit Comet? During a maneuver like that, center of gravity shouldn’t matter.
Anybody else get the feeling that all this talk about a bunker buster is just intended to spur the Iranians to relocate these assets? The US and Israel are essentially grouse hunting.
The aiming, though… could become tricky.
Ok, so hopefully this will put to bed any assertions that it’s just not possible for anything but a B-2 to physically carry and deploy a MOP:
Now…maybe that’s a specially configured B-52 for testing purposes, but clearly if They wanted to deploy a MOP from a B-52, They could come up with a configuration to do so.
The reason they don’t deploy MOPs from the B-52 nor, heck, for all I know, they actually do and the news has been lading us down a false path this whole time) has got to be the issue of stealth: if it’s an important enough target to be in a hardened bunker deep underground, it’s probably also important enough to be well-defended by SAM and interceptor aircraft.
ETA: And I see that the only citations for the wiki article saying that only the B-2 can deploy the MOP… is (1) the very article we’ve been discussing (so, it’s circular), and (2) another non-government source that says simply “The only conventional weapon that could plausibly achieve this is the American GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which—with over 12 metric tons and 6 meters long—can only be carried by large US bombers like the B-2 Spirit.”
“…like the B-2” does not mean only the B-2.
That Wikipedia article says that the Air Force only took deliveries of the bomb in 2011, after that test with the B-52 bomber, and the article mentions improvements to the bomb. It’s possible that the upgraded version can only be carried by the B2 bomber.
Am I the only one who sees that name as “Frodo”?
While there are a fleet of 19 operational B-2 ‘Spirit’ bombers you can only count on about a dozen actually being flightworthy at any given time because of the maintenance requirements. Although they are ‘too valuable’ for casual operations the US Air Force is always looking for a reason to justify their continued expense as their original mission (as the ‘third leg’ of the nuclear triad) doesn’t really hold water.
‘Stealth’ is a somewhat variable characteristic and there are definitely ways to improve detection of aircraft designed to be difficult to detect by search radar and SAM systems (S, C, and X band transmitters) which the Russians (and I’m sure the Chinese) have been working on for decades, but that technology almost certainly isn’t available to Iran which only has relatively obsolescent search radar and Cold War-era SAM systems, with their indigenously developed SAM capability unproven (and clearly not up to spec). I would wager that the B-2, even with known vulnerabilities, is near to undetectable by Iranian systems. Of course, that was thought to be the case for the F-117A ‘Nighthawk’ until one was shot down by the Yugoslav Army during the Kosovo War, so there are never any certainties on the battlefield, and the loss of a B-2 in operations against a third tier military would certainly be a blow to US prestige as well as compromising the supposed deterrent value of that entire system.
Just a nitpick but what you are thinking of is the 463L cargo pallet system which includes rails built into the floor of the aircraft cargo deck and the capability for air deployment using drogue parachutes for extraction. This system is limited to 10 kip per 20 ft pallet section, and the C-130 can only accept six (6) pallets so even if you could get a loadmaster to buy into the scheme to carry this bomb in a C-130 it wouldn’t ‘fit’ into the aircraft on this system. From a practical standpoint, you just wouldn’t use a C-130 for this application and the larger and more powerful C-17 with a purpose-designed rail deployment system would be the choice of aircraft for palletized air deployment of such a large payload, although it definitely isn’t stealthy or capable of evading air defenses.
The C-130 cannot flying in “zero-g parabolic arc” (the loaded climb rate is ~1,800 ft/min). The center of gravity still matters during a climb or dive because a sudden change in the distance between the center of gravity and center of pressure can have dramatic impact upon control and dynamics of the aircraft. For large deployments from the C-17 such as palletized missiles, the aircraft is held at level and fairly close to stall speed so that the payload deploys straight aft and doesn’t risk binding on the rail system or blowing out the drogue chutes during deployment. This deployment happens so quickly and pilots are aware of when it happens that controlling attitude of the aircraft isn’t really an issue.
Stranger
At this point, I’d say it’s more likely that some journalist misunderstood the practical considerations (the need for stealth against a country with a still-marginally functional air defense system, rather than a permissive environment like Afghanistan circa 2002) for a hard technical limit (payload capacity and configuration). An error in translation, so to speak.
I would be shocked if the B-52, which has a payload capacity of 70k (contrasted against the B-2’s 40k) and, as we have seen via photographic evidence of, has dropped the bomb in testing, would be physically incapable of deploying the MOP.