“Yes, the IAF could deliver an MOP,” Deptula says. However, the IAF has done what many considered impossible before, taking out the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 and the partially completed al-Kubar reactor near Deir ez-Zor, Syria in 2007. Successfully delivering MOPs to Tehran would be a tall order, requiring multi-domain, multidimensional operations with a variety of effects. The House bill could surely be seen as messaging but it would have significantly less value if a realistic possibility of the use of GBU-57s by the Israelis didn’t exist. The suggestion that Israel receive MOPs and B-52s was meant to be read with more than a literal interpretation, as he says the new legislation should be. was in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear aspirations. In 2014, retired USAF Lieutenant General David Deptula proposed transferring MOPs and a small number of B-52Hs to Israel in an op-ed he co-wrote for the Wall Street Journal.ĭeptula, who’s currently dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a fellow Forbes contributor, notes that when he wrote the op-ed the U.S. It too, is a precision-guided weapon.Ĭould the IAF adapt a C-130 to carry the MOP? Quite possibly, but the skies over Iran are heavily defended as opposed to the wide open airspace over Afghanistan. Though not a penetrator like the MOP, the MOAB weighs 22,600lb and is over 30 feet long, dimensions not that far off from the GBU-57. It was executed by an MC-130 Talon carrying a GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb. Some may recall that in 2017 President Trump approved a strike on ISIS tunnels and personnel in the Achin district of the Nangarhar province, Afghanistan.

Israel bunker buster missile