WEAPON OF THE WEEK: TV show on bombs as cheap Viagra

Back when we were all younger and happier, DD wrote a column called "Weapon of the Week" for the Village Voice. It was pitched as a satirical alternative to the trend in war journalism in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. At the time, our great newsmedia was pumping the polity full of stories about the great and wondrous technology we would be using on Saddam. All those super bombs would defeat the enemy in an instant without killing anyone but those who deserved it.

What rubbish it was. And it was easy to lampoon. All I had to do was watch cable news and pick up a couple daily newspapers to find some reporter or TV man going on about the "Mother of All Bombs" or some special thermobaric explosive that was going to kill Osama bin Laden in his cave or Saddam in his underground bunker. Those really worked good, didn't they? Well, as told in Dr. Strangelove, it's not fair to condemn an entire program for just a couple slip-ups.

Anyway, you don't see bomb journalism, anymore. Somehow, the same reporters who furnished all the original comedy on wonder weapons are no longer interested.

And that's a shame. Our bombs still need the love!

No one understands this more than the MILITARY CHANNEL, at slot number 116 on my cable box.

There are a couple of shows for the loving of bombs on every day but the one being pushed hardest is "Futureweapons." Hosted by an ex-Navy Seal with a shaven head, it is 50 percent pure entertainment and 50 percent outright falsehoods, which actually adds to its unintended fun factor.

Last night's segment was devoted to American weapons which are made purely to strike fear into the heart of the enemy.

The climax of the show was a bit on the MOAB, or previously mentioned "Mother of All Bombs."

Back in 2003, this is what I wrote:

Exultation over the new MOAB—perhaps the ugliest and most stupid of new weapons in the U.S. armory—reveals a poverty of intellect and heart in the country. A clumsy multi-ton monster bomb tested in Florida last week has no practical war purpose other than terror, in a military whose signal achievement in the last decade has been to make smaller weapons unerringly accurate.

The MOAB is the natural result of allowing munitions engineers to run amok, a design by the aggressively mediocre who in a better time and place would be sent into early retirement for the good of the taxpayer.

The Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or Mother of All Bombs (quite the rib-tickler), is so big it must be shoved out the tail of a lumbering transport plane on a sled attached to a drag parachute. This means MOAB can only be used against the helpless—an enemy who cannot shoot back because its air force has already been utterly smashed, its anti-aircraft missile network erased from the target area. A very large, undefended mosque would be a good hit for MOAB—meeting the bomb's criterion of use for "psychological" effect.

An idiot stationed in the Pentagon TV newsroom jabbered about the MOAB's "guidance" by Global Positioning System—great precision being unnecessary on the 21,000-pound bomb, another clue to its construction by government-sanctioned ninnies.

A small part of the blame for the MOAB must go to Dynetics, one more in a dismaying number of corporations that exist to provide applications in mayhem. The company's logo on the MOAB's tail was probably thought of as a coup in corporate advertising, although a bracing "Fuck You!" might have better created the impression that the thing was made by real people rather than a labful of killer androids on Eglin Air Force Base.

The MOAB is said to be a long-awaited improvement on the 15,000-pound Commando Vault ("Daisy Cutter") bomb, a canister of aluminum powder mixed in a slurry originally made to clear landing spaces of underbrush and demolish minefields. Daisy Cutters were used in Gulf War I and again in Afghanistan, to no obvious effect other than the creation of media and Pentagon erections. These cost $27,000 and change per bang, so even allowing for a three-ton increase in weight, MOAB should be cheap by Defense Department standards.

If the MOAB makes an appearance over Iraq, count on it to be enthusiastically superfluous due to the military axiom: A handful of really big bombs dropped in the open can't compare to thousands of much smaller ones smashing through windows, doorways, and hidey-holes.

The MOAB made no appearance in Iraq, a fact that probably annoyed the producers of "Futureweapons" ever so slightly. But the show did take viewers out to the town near Eglin Air Force Base to interview a few locals in a diner about the wonder of it. "Wow, aren't we Americans the best at this stuff!" was the general opinion.

The shows host added that the mere existence of the MOAB convinced the Iraqis they had to surrender. What a funny guy!

And the segment did answer the question on whether or not the MOAB was made by killer androids. It wasn't. It was designed by someone named Fred Davis. Way to go, Fred.

The Navy Seal described the MOAB as a precision-guided bomb with all sorts of bells and whistles without once noting the incongruity of the fact that you can't use it on anyone who shoots back because you have to push it out the back of slow transport plane, the C-130.

There also was a loud huzzah for the MOAB being the largest non-nuclear combat weapon, ever. This is unfair to the English who developed the Tall Boy and Grand Slam bombs, which were actually used in World War II against the battleship Tirpitz and submarine pens. (See here.)

Speaking of Navy Seals, while the human kind hosts "Futureweapons," DD once wrote about a real Navy seal named Zak. Just before war, Zak was sent to the Persian Gulf to defend our ships from treacherous Iraqi frogmen, the kind that didn't exist.

That's Zak above showing some mean pride as well as an impressive set of choppers.

I thought of him when reading lately of how we shot up every dinghy and rowboat in the Iraqi navy and how we were having to buy new dinghies and rowboats so the Iraqis could kinda-sorta help out defending their southern oil terminal.

Three years have passed and DD now wonders what happened to Zak? Had he been hit by stop loss orders and signed on for additional tours of duty? Had he been recruited for a win-hearts-and-minds campaign? "Come down to the waterfront and feed a fish to Zak instead of driving that one ton of explosives into the Green Zone today!" Or had Zak been allowed to come home to the sunny waters of San Diego?

---

The originals on MOAB and Zak.