Trump's 21,600-Pound Exit Strategy

The Pentagon has a 21,600 pound bomb that cannot destroy the target it was aimed at, and a president who needs the explosion more than the outcome.

"The MOAB is a massive information operation type weapon that is great for huge area clearance but not much else."

— US military official, to CNN, on the "Mother of All Bombs" plan

The US military has drawn up new strike plans for Iran that include the possible use of the largest non-nuclear bomb in the American arsenal, according to multiple US officials familiar with the matter. Should President Trump order a resumption of combat operations, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known as the "mother of all bombs" or MOAB, would be aimed at Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear sites, including the granite-encased Pickaxe Mountain facility where the US and Israel believe Tehran has stashed components of its nuclear program.

The timing is the tell. The strikes, officials told CNN, would come "prior to US retrograde in CENTCOM AOR," that is, before the American military withdraws from the region. The sequence being sketched in planning meetings is a big boom, a victory declaration, a departure. After more than six months of US bombing, with the November 3 midterms weeks away and the war deeply unpopular at home, the White House appears to be shopping for a definitive ending to a conflict it cannot win and refuses to admit it has lost.

The bomb is real. The doubt is too.

The MOAB weighs 21,600 pounds, runs 30 feet long, carries 18,000 pounds of H6 high explosives, and detonates a few feet above the ground. The blast levels everything above ground within roughly a mile and can wipe out an area the size of nine city blocks. What it is not, by the Pentagon's own assessment, is a bunker buster. The GBU-43 was built to be loud. The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000 pound steel warhead that punches through 200 feet of rock, is the bomb built to be useful against hardened underground targets.

Pickaxe Mountain is, by every account, exactly the kind of target the MOAB was not designed for. "It is definitely not designed as a deep penetration warhead," one official familiar with the planning told CNN. Another was blunter still: "The MOAB is a massive information operation type weapon that is great for huge area clearance but not much else."

Translation: the biggest bomb in the country cannot crack the mountain it was aimed at, so the plan is to make a loud enough sound that nobody asks what happened next.

That is the arithmetic of the plan: psychological effects, not penetration.

The same official offered a candid theory of why the White House is looking at a weapon it knows will not deliver the kill: "POTUS has unfortunately put himself in a situation where he is almost compelled to do something and, without the ammunition designed to penetrate that level ... you have to look at psychological effects for which the MOAB is well-equipped."

The military, it turns out, has been asked to build a menu. One source described some of the options as a "fireworks show," a phrase that should have been retired from Pentagon planning documents years ago. The objective is not to win a war the administration cannot declare, or rather cannot finish. The objective is to manufacture a "symbolic" win that can be sold to an American public that, by every recent Pew and CNN poll, increasingly expects this war to drag on for months. Gas prices and the September inflation report have done the rest of the persuasion.

A "definitive" end to the war, in other words, is a video clip.

There is a history to this. The MOAB was born in the Iraq War and finalized in 2003, and by the Pentagon's own account was conceived primarily as a weapon for "psychological operations." The idea was that a blast so enormous that Iraqi troops would see it coming and surrender, or simply stop fighting, before it arrived. Its name came from Saddam Hussein's invocation of the "mother of all battles" during the 1991 Gulf War, which makes for a tidy footnote: the bomb was named after the delusions of an Iraqi general, and it is now being used to serve the delusions of an American president.

It has been dropped once. Trump authorized it in 2017, in his first term, against an ISIS tunnel network in Afghanistan. The strike was a turning point for the isolationist "America first" candidate who had campaigned against it; he changed his mind about bombs faster than he changes his mind about most things. Afghan officials put the toll at 36 ISIS fighters killed, some accounts say as many as 94; three tunnels were destroyed; and the village below, as it happened, paid a cost the official casualty count did not capture.

Twenty three years after the weapon was designed to make enemies surrender, it has come around the circle: the United States now intends to use it to make an enemy cave in a war the United States cannot end.

The reason the plan matters is that the pause in fighting is already fraying.

A container ship sank in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. Houthi missiles struck Saudi soil this week with deadly effect, including facilities run by Aramco, and Tehran says it is "counting the moments" until it can strike US warships. Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told television audiences late Wednesday that Iran will combine military capability with negotiation to push Washington toward its demands, which include lifting the naval blockade and sanctions and withdrawing US forces from the region. Iranian security chiefs have threatened Gulf data centers and undersea cables. An IRGC security adviser promised that American ground forces would be captured in such numbers that Washington would be "forced to raise the white flag."

Meanwhile the Pentagon is quietly preparing for Iranian retaliation. The next rotation of troops in the CENTCOM region is expected within weeks, and some of the service members rotating out may simply not be replaced. The carrier that set a Navy record with more than 260 consecutive days at sea has finally come into port. The machinery of a war the administration describes as paused is still running.

The White House told CNN it does not comment on "sensitive military plans that may or may not exist," adding that Trump "keeps all options on the table to ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon." The Pentagon's answer was a sentence that could be printed on a hat: "The Department of War plans for a wide range of operational scenarios to execute Presidential and Secretary level direction and to ensure mission success in any operational environment."

A wide range of operational scenarios. What is missing from that sentence is a single operational scenario in which the United States stops this war. Every plan on the menu ends the same way: more bombing, a bigger boom, another statement. The MOAB sits at the top of the menu not because it is the right tool, but because it is the loudest one available.

The Pentagon has a bomb that cannot destroy the target it was aimed at, and a president who needs the explosion more than the outcome. That is the whole strategy, and it is the most honest description of this war anyone has offered in months. The question is no longer whether the MOAB can crack Pickaxe Mountain. It is whether anyone in this administration can crack the fact that the most powerful weapon the United States can drop from the sky has become the best available ending to a war it cannot win, a war it cannot stop, and a war the American people never asked for.