MOP Up

Though it’s still being tweaked and tested, the Air Force’s Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb is available for use if needed, said Air Force Secretary Michael Donley. “If it was needed to go today, we would be able to do that,” he told a Capitol Hill audience on July 25 during a speech sponsored by AFA, the National Defense Industrial Association, and Reserve Officers Association. “We could go with the existing configuration,” he noted, but the Air Force will also continue to perform testing on the weapon to refine it. Air Force officials first announced last fall that MOP was ready for combat. Boeing builds the 30,000-pound-class bunker buster, which the B-2A stealth bomber carries. MOP is designed to give the United States the means to hold difficult-to-access targets at risk—such as the hardened and deeply buried nuclear development and test facilities reportedly in countries like Iran and North Korea—without having to employ nuclear weapons. (For more from Donley’s talk, read It Only Gets Harder and Not the OCO Funding Endgame, and Pain Metrics.)