The title overstates the case, but this story of the red-tape cutting, round-the clock efforts to field a bunker busting bomb during the Gulf War is fascinating stuff.
(Today has been a bear for a variety of uninteresting reasons, so no LinkSwarm today. Hopefully tomorrow…)
Tags: Air Force, bomb, Desert Storm, Gulf War, Military, video
It is always a good idea to take anything like this with a grain of salt. Yes, the demonstrated ability to take out the commanders in their bunkers played a part in ending the war, but that factor was only a part of what went into the Iraqi decision to negotiate.
I don’t think there’s ever been a single overwhelming weapon or tactical “thing” that’s actually ended a war emphatically. People tend to pick specific things out that the winning side did or had, and then ascribe victory to those things. The reality is that such things are really only small components of what made the one side victorious; the bigger reason was the entire complex of industrial and military capacity that the US then possessed that the Iraqis could not match. It wasn’t the bomb, in other words: It was the fact that the US could produce them with such ease and faculty.
Unsure of whether or not this is still the case. I know that DIE has likely gutted a lot of the agencies and companies that used to do this stuff. Not too many chirpy types out there who’re good at building things…
The bunkers allowed the Iraqi Regime to charge an unacceptable price for victory. The “Bunker buster” negated that price. The choice was, “Surrender or die!”.
The IDF played a similar game in Gaza. The IDF launched a “pretend” attack. That got the Islamists into the tunnels. The IDF then used penetrating Bombs to hit the end points of the tunnels instead of paying the blood price of clearing the tunnels with infantry. Entombed terrorists were no threat to the Israelis. Burying the Islamists with precision penetrating bombs was “cheap” and easy. “Smart” paid off. Israel used their strength and refused to play the Islamist tunnel game.
I guess we are going to see how good the Iranian nuclear bunkers really are.
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