Trump makes good on cost-cutting promises.

The MOAB is actually a very efficient Freedom-Delivery-System (FDS). It's just a big metal tube with a detonator at one end, fins at the other, and 18,000 pounds of Freedom in the middle, and all designed to be shoved out the back of a C-130 Cargo Plane. To deliver that much Freedom in standard 500 pound doses would require 36 round-trips from a much more expensive F-16, or 18 strikes with half-million dollar Tomahawks, instead of just one inexpensive trip with a C-130. All in all, this is a very cost effective way to get a bunch of Freedom delivered all at once.

 

Right, we need to use more MOABs and less Cruise Missiles. Dollar for dollar, we'll get a lot more Freedom exported this way.

 

"Blast Radius" appears to be one of those meaningless phrases thrown around, rather than a useful measure of effectiveness. In one description, they use "one mile" but then get vague about casualties or buildings destroyed within that mile radius. I suppose the usual mud and stone Afghan building might get knocked down a mile away, but not a better built structure.

I do like this weapon, despite the drawback of a risky delivery by a slow cargo plane. In effect, it would not be useful at all against a modern force with SAM missiles, but can be quite effective against enemies found in a place like Afghanistan. This is a low cost weapon that they could, should, drop on every known strong-point in those mountains.

 

US and Afghan forces have been in the area for 24 hours now and have found 96 bodies. The cost of a MOAB is (reportedly) 170K, so that's less than 2K per Jihadi. Moreover, had friendly ground forces gone in without that bomb, as was SOP before the election, they'd have lost as many as they killed which is an infinitely more painful cost.

 

Not according to the commander on the ground. Or, at least the latitude to choose ordnance over live bodies is recent. We lost a guy there last week in the typical strategy of trading corpse for corpse. Now, they can use big bombs to kill Jihadis, instead of live soldiers.

 

If the bomb was precisely targeted and it was the most powerful non nuclear explosive, I would have thought that there would be little remaining to count as a body. Am I missing something here?

 

I suppose anyone near the epicenter would be obliterated, but most people would be in those collapsed tunnels or further out from the explosion and just killed by the violence of the blast or even the concussion effect. Those further out are probably three valleys away by now and saying 'What? Huh? What?" in Dari or Pashtun.

 

They've now changed the number from 96 to 94. I suppose it's challenging to stack up parts and match them to torsos.

 

So, in other words the Afghanis found 13 bodies and the remains of 11 camels. Bringing us to the total of 94 insurgents killed.

Remind me again, as it has gone on so long that I have forgotten...Are we fighting for or against freedom in Afghanistan?

 

I smelled a Viet Nam style body count before they started counting bodies.

 

Actually, the other side is the one that has a history of monkeying with body counts this time. Enemy combatants/insurgents often become innocent civilians, college students, shepherds, etc. I tend to think they'll be particularly careful in putting out numbers as the adversarial press would love to find something they could use to discredit the action.
That being said, I take pleasure in thinking about how the MOAB's explosion consumed all the oxygen in the area, actually sucking the air out of the insurgents lungs collapsing them, suffocation is a good, terrifying way for them to die. Also many of those protected in caves and tunnels that didn't collapse would have been subjected to the shock wave and over pressure which would have ruptured their internal organs so they bled out internally and painfully. Those that were incinerated or buried were the lucky ones.

 

Exulting in the method of death is just bringing yourself down to their level.