It’s called the Massive Ordinance Air Blast weapon, or MOAB for short, but it had never been used in combat despite having been successfully tested back in 2003…until today.

There was a compound in eastern Afghanistan from which ISIS fighters – yes, we’re now dealing with ISIS in Afghanistan – had been staging attacks on American troops and actually killed one of our people earlier this week. From the Air Force Times…

According to a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the fact that the MOAB was dropped in the same province where Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar of 7th Special Forces Group was killed on 8 April 2017 is probably not a coincidence. “There might have been a degree of payback here as well,” Bill Roggio told Air Force Times. “There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, especially if you’re killing your enemy.”

So instead of the Barack Obama surgical-strike, pinprick approach you now get the Donald Trump bonus plan. Here’s a video of CNN’s report about the bomb, plus a short History Channel-type (maybe this is from the Discovery Channel; who knows?) segment on the bomb’s development.

And here’s a little video of a MOAB’s effect…

This isn’t a weapon that makes an enormous amount of sense to use in most situations. It’s built to take out an enemy when he’s dug in – though the MOAB is not a penetrator. It won’t knock out a steel-reinforced concrete bunker, for example.

But a cave-complex like the one in Nangahar Province the Air Force hit today? Yes. Here’s something from a 2000 US Defense Intelligence Agency study on thermobaric bombs – which technically the MOAB is not, but used as it was today contains functionally similar properties – and their effects (per Wikipedia)…

The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant…. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs…. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.

And something from a CIA study, also via Wikipedia…

“[T]he effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness.” Another Defense Intelligence Agency document speculates that because the “shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue…it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate.”

In other words, when this goes off above the cave you’re in, you either get turned into a crispy critter right away if the actual explosion gets close enough to you, or if not, you get hit with a massive air pressure wave which pretty much liquifies your internal organs – and then, as the mushroom cloud builds overhead, the vacuum created at the blast point sucks all the air out of that cave you’re in and what’s left of you has nothing to breathe, so you lay suffocating in a pool of your own blood.

And, like Roggio says, there is certainly nothing wrong with that.