Air Force Times October 23, 2007
Bunker busters eyed in revised war funding
By Erik Holmes
President Bush’s emergency war spending request submitted to Congress on Monday includes funding to buy more Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, more Sniper targeting pods for aircraft and a program to arm the B-2 with the Air Force’s largest “bunker buster” bomb.
The Air Force would get $22.9 billion of the $196 billion revised request for the Defense Department for fiscal 2008, but the proposal must first be approved by Congress.
It is in addition to the Air Force’s normal 2008 budget, still making its way through Congress.
The largest chunk of the Air Force’s share — $10.8 billion — would fund daily operations and maintenance costs.
About $3.9 billion would pay for more Predator and Reaper UAVs; modifications to the A-10, F-15 and F-16; Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System command-and-control aircraft; and Sniper targeting pods.
The request includes $1.6 billion to pay for research and development, including a program to arm the B-2 stealth bomber with the 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrator.
The Air Force and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency have been developing the weapon since 2004 and began flight-testing it at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in September.
The GPS-guided weapon is designed to penetrate and destroy heavily fortified or buried targets such as caves, tunnels and bunkers — including, for example, Iran’s hardened nuclear sites or al-Qaida’s cave complexes.
“We have a mission to defeat ... hard and deeply buried targets where our adversary would have the support structure for WMD-type systems,” Bob Hastie, chief of the hard target defeat branch and manager of the massive ordnance penetrator program at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, told Air Force Times in February. “It [could] be the actual bad stuff [or] it could be the command and control that supports the use of those type systems. It could be the terrorist that is holding [a weapon of mass destruction] in a tunnel facility in Afghanistan.”
The bomb measures more than 20 feet long and 31½ inches in diameter. Its casing is built from 3½-inch-thick high-performance steel. It contains about 5,500 pounds of explosives. The remaining 24,500 pounds are primarily steel, which gives it the heft to burrow into a target.
It is designed to penetrate as deeply as 200 feet into a target before detonating, according to GlobalSecurity.org.
If deployed, the weapon would be the Air Force’s largest bomb, far outweighing the 21,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb and the 15,000-pound Daisy Cutter, and dwarfing the biggest bunker busters, the BLU-113 and BLU-122, at 5,000 pounds each.
© Copyright 2007, Army Times Publishing Company
