Podcast: B-2s, Penetrator Bombs And Destroyed F-14s

The U.S. followed Israel in striking Iranian nuclear infrastructure, launching the largest B-2 raid ever and dropping its biggest conventional bombs. Listen as editors assess the operation and landscape in Iran after almost two weeks of fighting.

Subscribe Now

Don't miss a single episode of the award-winning Check 6. Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Discover all of our podcasts at aviationweek.com/podcasts

AI-Generated Transcript

Robert Wall (00:22): Welcome back to Check 6, where we are going to take another look at what's been going on with military activity in Iran. If you're interested on the impact to commercial aviation, I'd refer you to our sister podcast Window Seat. But on the military front, our listeners will remember, we gave you a first sense of our observations last week from the Paris Air Show, but a lot's happened since then. We're not going to get into the high politics so much of this and try to focus on the hardware side, but you never know where the conversation takes us. 

Joining me today are Brian Everstine, Aviation Week's Pentagon Editor, Senior Defense Editor Steve Trimble and London Bureau Chief Tony Osborne. I'm Robert Wall, the executive editor for Defense and Space at Aviation Week. So Brian, while Steve, Tony and I were making our way from the sweltering Paris Airshow back home, you were dealing with B-2s flying into the heat of the Middle East. So why don't you kick it off with your reflections about what was interesting and notable about that strike.

Brian Everstine (01:17): Yes, absolutely. It all started off with us watching B-2s heading west toward the Pacific, which we all thought they would be deploying to Guam or Diego Garcia to get set up for potential attacks on Iran. But that ended up being a complete decoy, and as those bombers were heading west, another group of seven were heading east, meeting up with plenty of tankers flying through the Med over Israel and into Iran. So as this play-by-play was laid out by General Caine, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, these bombers met up with a group of fourth and fifth generation fighters to be escorted into Iranian airspace. While at the same time, Navy ships and subs fired a volley of Tomahawk land attack missiles at three key nuclear sites inside Iran, most notably 14 massive ordnance penetrators were dropped on the Fordow enrichment site, which President Trump on his social media sites said it was completely obliterated.

Robert Wall (02:12): Well, Brian, before we get into actually what was exactly struck and what may have happened, why don't you tell us a bit more about the actual package that you mentioned, fourth and fifth generation fighters. Obviously the Israelis had been roaming the skies of Iran and already established air dominance, but what else did the U.S. do to make sure those B-2s made it in and out safely as they did?

Brian Everstine (02:35): Yeah, a lot of the attention was on the B-2s, but I thought it was really interesting when General Caine mentioned the escort of fourth and fifth generation fighters specifically, he said that they employed high-speed suppression weapons to ensure safe passage of the strike package and did some preemptive suppression fires against any potential surface-to-air threats. So we haven't gotten the full specific breakdown of what these exact fighters were. We know they deployed F-22s to the region. There's obviously a presence of F-16s, F-15s. The Navy carriers in the region have Growlers. So use of the escort package inside Iranian airspace was very interesting, especially to the fact that they appear to have not even been seen. No Iranian shots were fired, no Iranian fighters were scrambled. So all told, I think the total breakdown there were the 125 total aircraft participating, including all the tankers. We assumed some command and control and that sort of thing. So it was a pretty gigantic mission, especially to be done in complete silence.

Robert Wall (03:32): Yeah. Well, let's talk a bit about really what was struck and what may have happened. Steve, you did a debrief column for us on this, a lot of controversy in the last 24 hours. Really a lot of questions how effective these strikes were. So talk to us a bit about why is there's so much debate around this.

Steve Trimble (03:53): I mean, the most interesting thing, the thing that really sticks out from the strikes is the combat debut of the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This is a weapon that actually entered service about 13, 14 years ago, but has never been used for this purpose or at all really. And it's significant. The target set of underground hardened, deeply buried targets is a very challenging mission for the military, but also becoming very important. It is not just about Iran. If you look at the China Military Power reports going back several years, they talk about China's strategy of building out thousands of underground complexes for their weapons, for their command and control, for their communications. So it's a big deal and it's important that we have that these weapons are out there and if they work now, the question has always been how effective are penetrating munitions? We know that the whole effort to start developing Massive Ordnance Penetrator really got started in 2004 with the Defense Science Board study that looked at the performance of 2,000-pound BLU-109 and 5,000-pound GBU-28 penetrating weapons in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, and there were mixed results.

(05:26): And so they recommended the urgent development of a 20- to 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator with the goal they set of using two. And if two hit at exactly the same spot, there's a chance you could penetrate to a depth of 40 meters through moderately dense rock as they described it. And then if you turn the page, they actually increase that to 60 meters and they don't explain why there's a difference on each page about how far you can go with a 30,000-pound, but that's where a lot of this information comes from. That Massive Ordnance Penetrator can penetrate to a depth of 200 feet, 60 meters translates to about 197 feet. The Air Force has never released the actual penetrating depth of MOP, but it does appear in this report. And every time you see that number thrown around, if there's any citation at all, it usually leads back to this Defense Science Board report.

(06:30): And that's where we get that. But also in that Defense Science Board report, there's a lot of ambiguity about penetrating weapon performance. They found in OAF and Desert Storm that sometimes they thought they had direct hits on a bunker that obliterated and totally destroyed to use a recent phrase, the contents within that shelter, that hardened shelter or bunker. And once they actually got inside, they saw nothing had actually been damaged. In other cases, it looked like there had only been superficial damage to the ceiling. And once they got inside, they discovered everything within it was ripped apart because of the shockwave. So it's very difficult to assess the performance of these weapons from above from aerial imagery, which appears to be all we have. And of course, we have seen the sort of dueling assessments, the initial White House assessment and President Trump's assessment that this target, especially at Fordow, which was the main target, is a very important target where you can enrich the uranium U-235 to 90% or higher.

(07:44): But his assessment was that facility was totally and completely obliterated by those strikes, a Defense Intelligence Agency report that had been leaked to CNN and now essentially confirmed by President Trump this morning, we're talking on June 25th and Trump in a press conference at the NATO summit essentially divulged the contents of what had been that classified report and said that its conclusions was we don't know. We don't know what happened. And I think that given the history of penetrating weapons, that's not a crazy or an outlandish or an aberrant assessment to make given what we're talking about. And it really is until you get inside those bunkers and inside those facilities, you really don't know. Now, the one caveat to that is a statement that was made by Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, the agency that monitors those facilities.

(08:48): He's been inside that facility many times and he said that those centrifuges are incredibly sensitive to vibration. So now if you have multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrators coming in to the roof of that facility, which is a couple hundred feet underground, at least it's possible that the vibrations may have caused some damage to those centrifuges even if the weapons themselves were not able to penetrate to that depth. Of course we don't know that, but that's what we're talking about here with the ambiguity. I would be careful to make any definitive claims based on at least what we've seen in the open source visual imagery of the impact of those strikes.

Robert Wall (09:42): Before I bring in Tony here, I just want to, it was interesting, I think Brian or you reported that the MOPs that were used is basically more than half the inventory that we believe the U.S. has had, so more than half the production runs. So I guess maybe just quickly, where does that leave the U.S. now?

Steve Trimble (10:06): So we do know that there was an unclassified production run of about 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrators. There may have been more. Bloomberg reported a few years ago that there were plans afoot to accelerate production of that weapon. So there may have been more funded in classified accounts over the years, who knows, but I'd be surprised if we just built 20 and left it at that, I guess. But in the meantime, yeah, we have been embarking, I think largely because of the Chinese threat on a modernization of our penetrating arsenal to include a 5,000-pound A-5K. That was what the program used to be called. Now it's GBU-72 that has actually been introduced into service and this year, the fiscal 2025 year, we were supposed to do a new start development of a next generation penetrator with a warhead in the 22,000-pound class, or at least I think the specification was, it was not to exceed 22,000 pounds. That's just the warhead itself. I'm not sure if that also includes the explosive fill inside it and of course does not include the navigation and guidance system in the tail kit.

(11:25): And on top of that, I would not be surprised if there is additional work with powered munitions of some kind. Force equals mass times acceleration. So either you go big on the mass and just use gravity for your acceleration, or you can reduce that mass by significantly increasing the acceleration. So it's possible something at a smaller form factor like a 2,000-pound bomb with a powered, some kind of powered propulsion system with it may also be in development. It certainly has been a concept that has been thrown around by AFRL in the past. Where it's gone is not clear. It would be in classified accounts, but that'd be something I would look for.

Brian Everstine (12:15): And just one aside, I thought what was interesting to add is this, when you look at the bombers that were searched both to go west and to go east, that's 19 B-2s, that's pretty much every operational bomber they had available I think would be involved in this flight. So we're already hearing this bolstering the case for buying more than the current 100 aircraft program of record for B-21s.

Robert Wall (12:37): Yeah, for sure. Tony, you've also been following this operation obviously from the get-go and had some observation both on what the Iranians and the Americans have been up to and the Israelis for that matter of course, too. So why don't you kind of give us your take?

Tony Osborne (12:55): No, it was really just a few thoughts. Really just following on from what Steve said about this incredibly difficult target set that perhaps in an earlier era, we would've probably dug a site like this out. We've basically with nuclear weapons, we could literally just pile them in several times and try to dig it out. And also just point out that maybe the original penetrating weapon was of course the British Tallboy, which was designed to go after German submarine pens during World War II. Again, really challenging target set, and I think it'd be very interesting to see whether these have been effective. Obviously the U.S. raid was clearly a lot of the work had already been done by Israel. Israel had already secured significant air superiority over Iran, but also Iraq in Syria. That was the route that these bombers seemed to have taken into Iran to go and attack the targets at Fordow, Natanz and the third location. So a lot of that work had been done. I suspect those strikes that Brian was talking about were just predetermined just to make sure that nothing could light these aircraft up. One of the more interesting aspects I found is sort of the work that Israel is now doing in Iran, obviously it's been attacking high priority targets. It's also started attacking the Air Force on the ground. We've seen very sad imagery of F-14s being taken out, which is terribly sad as Steve, I'm sure we'll all agree.

Robert Wall (14:26): I think I blame Steve for making the point on a prior podcast that the Iranian Air Force hadn't taken in enough of a beating, and then a few days later the beatings starts. So Steve, it's your fault that F-14s are being obliterated here.

Tony Osborne (14:41): Absolutely. But the other interesting one was the removal of AH-1 Cobras, which I found to be a very strange threat to Israel. But one only determine that actually maybe if the Iranian populace decide to rise up against a weakened Iranian state, that those helicopters could be used to go and cause harm to them. And maybe this is Israel's way of saying, yeah, let's remove this potential threat to the Iranian populace should there be some kind of uprising or coup, not that we're seeing any evidence of that right now. They obviously have a very strong fist on which to rule the country.

Robert Wall (15:22): Interesting on that as well. Of course, they targeted the Iranian radio propaganda station, so to speak, which is also something you wouldn't generally do if you try to affect regime change.

Tony Osborne (15:33): Just coming back to Brian's point, the whole decoy effort, I mean that really is about spotters online sort of saying, look, there's all these bombers going into the Pacific are going into the Indian Ocean to go and operate out of Diego Garcia. But I think there was one single tweet that said, oh, I've just seen several B-2s going east. What's going on here? And this extraordinary effort by the U.S. Air Force to put all those aircraft into the air. I mean, the B-2 has never had a particularly high reliability record. I think looking back, if you look back through the various documentation over the years, the B-2 has always had a fairly low availability rate. So to get virtually the entire operational fleet on this mission is an incredible achievement by them. But it shows the capability that U.S. Air Force has. No other Air Force in the world could have done this.

Robert Wall (16:29): I think that's actually a point that goes more widely for this operation. I do think then the ability to generate sorties also by the Israelis has been pretty impressive. I mean much smaller Air Force and even though it doesn't seem like the pace of operations from day one through day three remained afterwards, I thought it was pretty striking how they have really managed to generate regularly 50-60 sorties. Again, not that huge an Air Force. And if you think about it,

Tony Osborne (17:06): Not only that, but with a very limited number of tankers. I mean, I think the Israeli Air Force has only a handful of Boeing 707s to be able to do this, and they've been heavily tasked the last few weeks plus with strategic missions as well. So yeah, serious effort. And you do wonder whether Europe could match anything like that, even a combined effort to do anything like this?

Robert Wall (17:28): Yeah, for sure. We should probably talk briefly at least. I mean, the Iranians did respond to the U.S. bombing, so somewhat, Brian, you kind of jumped on that with Tony as well. So maybe just so we don't gloss entirely over it since that is in a way almost the last big piece of the action before the two parties were told to settle down,

Brian Everstine (17:54): It seemed to essentially be a token response. All the feedback that we've heard, I think it was 14 short and medium range ballistic missiles launched to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, 13 of the 14 were shot down. One just landed in a non-threatening area. I think Trump had phrased it. So it was pretty much making a point to respond, but without really any damage. And I mean everyone expected it to come. I think they kind of tipped their hand a little bit. Yeah,

Robert Wall (18:23): And interesting also in a way, I mean obviously there is, as you point out Al Udeid, the Qataris are there, but also the Qataris have been the negotiating channel through which a lot of these conversations have been going on. So I thought was interesting too.

Brian Everstine (18:44): I thought it was pretty notable that Iran had a much more forceful response in response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani back in January, 2020, hitting Ain al-Asad air base. I mean dozens of traumatic brain injuries, no other physical injuries, but I mean shut down the base for days. That was much more forceful response. I'd say

Tony Osborne (19:06): It was probably important to point out a lot of the aircraft had already been pulled out of Al Udeid. I mean, there was an exodus of tankers and Rivet Joints out of that base, literally the moment Israel started attacking Iran because of that potential threat. But it's really interesting that the Iranians actually decided to go for the one, I guess, minor ally that they had among the GCC nations. So no wonder Qatar is a little bit peeved at them. I think for even starting this, even if it did provide them with warning, I think to actually send ballistic missiles at Qatar is a fairly risky move for the Iranians and their relationship with Doha.

Robert Wall (19:45): I mean, given the base isn't that far from Doha, but Steve, you wanted to chime in.

Steve Trimble (19:50): Well, I think we need to just acknowledge how orchestrated or calibrated both of these strikes were. We limited our attack on Iran, the U.S. anyway, to a very specific set of targets. And Iran responded in a very specific way with a specific number of munitions that was also supposed to be calibrated. I think if this was an all-out war or a less limited war, I mean, a good example is I think we got a two-hour warning before Al Udeid was hit, probably hour and a half warning before the missiles were launched. That means we had satellites, we had airborne, we had some kind of intelligence telling us that those missiles were getting ready to be launched. We didn't scramble fighters. We could have taken out those missile launchers potentially if we could see them getting ready. And we had that warning time before they were actually launched to take them out and we didn't take it. And that shows just a limited approach that we took here, and we essentially allowed ourselves to get hit by these ballistic missiles just so that Iran could say that they've responded, nobody got hurt, everything's fine, and we can move on. But this is not traditional war type scenario, this very limited punch and counter punch.

Robert Wall (21:25): And just to wrap it up here, I think also very interesting to some extent, I mean I think the main parties involved are all really eyeing each other. I mean, right now, as I said, in this kind of freeze it seems like, but I think easily we could be back at it again within hours or days, certainly. And I thought it was interesting the IDF chief of staff just today saying, praising the troops, but also signaling pretty clearly this is not over. This is not certainly not necessarily over, I'm using the phrase we can't rest on our laurels. So I think if you think about, I think Israel now that Iran seems pretty weakened is not going to even as they try to not anger President Trump, but they're probably not going to be very patient if something happens here.

Tony Osborne (22:26): There's always obviously the next big question is what Iran does to try and re-arm. Obviously been discussing for quite some time, given Iran's relationship now with Moscow over supplying equipment for Ukraine, particularly around the drones. There was this sort of talk of this quid pro quo where Russia could provide combat aircraft and helicopters. It certainly already provided some jet trainers. I think they were the first aircraft to be supplied or military aircraft to be supplied to Iran for many years, which was a couple of years ago. And there's still talk of whether an Su-35 delivery will take place. I wonder if we may now see some of that accelerated given the pretty poor performance we saw from the Iranian Air Force and whether there might be reprisals against elements in the Air Force that didn't actually go and try and attempt to shoot down the Israeli Air Forces. As Steve mentioned in the previous podcast. One wonders, what are the next steps for the Iranian military at this point?

Robert Wall (23:27): Well, and I agree. I mean we're probably will play out here in the coming weeks to see what happens domestically. But I mean you also, I forgot to factor in there a bit. The Russians were supposed to be a strategic ally. They certainly didn't show up. The Russian equipment arguably didn't show up right, the S-300s that they were easily taken out. We've joked before that Ukraine wasn't exactly a great sales pitch for the Russian arms industry. And I think Syria, and I think this doubly so at the end of the day, Tehran probably doesn't have many choices where to go, but if you have limited money, do you go to a place that didn't perform last time and didn't show up as an ally last time? You got to wonder.

Tony Osborne (24:17): Russia particularly has no capacity to actually produce anything for Iran as it's throwing all of its effort at Ukraine. But Mr. Steve,

Steve Trimble (24:25): Well, it's not just Russian systems, it's also Iranian Air defense technology. I happened to get a look at it when I was in Brazil a few months ago at the Iranian Ministry of Defense Exhibit Booth at the Latin American Aerospace and Defense Show. And they had all of their stuff there and all of their missiles, but laid out all the specs. And of course, they're trying to sell it in Latin America. They've had some success in Venezuela and they've got a defense pact with Bolivia. So things like that, I mean, that also will have an effect. Don't, regarding Tony's point, I don't see any way forward for the Iranian Air Force after this. I mean, I can't imagine the Russians transferring those Su-35s that were originally meant for Egypt, but that order got canceled. And so those Su-35s have been sitting at Komsomolsk-on-Amur for the last two, three years, if not longer. And it just seems to strain credulity to see Russia transfer those aircraft and if the Iranian pilots even get proficiency training at this point, or you know what they do, they don't have any aircraft to fly on the ground or anywhere now.

Robert Wall (25:41): Well listen, let's wrap it there. Since some of us, all of us I guess, have to commit some of this now to print. So thanks. Thanks, Steve, Tony, and Brian for joining. Thanks, Guy Ferneyhough, our podcast producer for helping us put this together and getting this out. And as always, thanks to our listeners for your time and attention and for checking out Check 6 and check back soon.