Pentagon didn’t need Trump’s permission to use ‘mother of all bombs’, officials say

The US commander in Afghanistan who ordered use of the “mother of all bombs” to attack an Islamic State stronghold near the Pakistani border didn’t need and didn’t request President Donald Trump’s approval, Pentagon officials said on Friday.

The officials said that even before Trump took office in January, General John Nicholson had standing authority to use the bomb, which is officially called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, or MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb ever dropped in combat. The bomb, dropped by a special operations MC-130 aircraft, had been in Afghanistan since January.

The officials weren’t authorised to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity.

The bomb’s use has attracted enormous attention, but its aim in Thursday’s attack was relatively mundane by military standards: destroy a tunnel and cave complex used by Islamic State fighters in a remote mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan.

Nicholson had a secondary goal in mind, however, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters. The official said Nicholson wanted to demonstrate to leaders of the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan the seriousness of his determination to eliminate the group as a military threat.

The official said use of the weapon had nothing to do with sending a message to any other country, including North Korea.

The Air Force estimates each MOAB costs about US$170,000 to build. It hasn’t said how much it cost to develop the bomb or how many exist. An Air Force spokeswoman, Erika A. Yepsen, said the bomb was made “in-house”, with some parts manufactured by the Air Force itself, so the overall cost is only an estimate. Most weapons are made by defence companies under written government contracts.

Nine years ago the Air Force published an account of how it came to manufacture the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, known technically as the GBU-43B, a designation that reflects the fact that it is precision-guided. The weapon from which it evolved, the BLU-82 (Bomb Live Unit-82), was about half MOAB’s size and was an unguided, or dumb, bomb.