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"On Sunday, when those jets returned to Whiteman, their families were there — flags flying and tears flowing." —U.S. Air Force Gen. Dan "Razin" Caine, on the B-2 Spirit bomber crews who conducted their part of Operation Midnight Hammer.
The dead-sexy B-2 Spirit bombers and their highly trained crews got all the attention in the days following Operation Midnight Hammer, but there was so much more to the mission than a half-dozen or so stealth jets carrying massive bunker-buster bombs.
How much more? The story begins 15 years ago, when the Pentagon first looked at how to bomb targets like Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, buried deep under a mountain. Actually, it began in the 1980s with the development of our first stealth bomber — or no, wait, that’s not quite right either. To tell the full story of Midnight Hammer, I need to take you back to 1941 and a U.S. Army effort to maximize its ability to "reach out and touch someone" with maximum lethality.
Midnight Hammer began simply enough around midnight Eastern on June 21, with a record-setting seven Spirits heading east toward Iran from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. A few other B-2s — the operation now involves more than half of our entire inventory of stealth bombers — fly west toward Guam as decoys. Military analysts on X posted the progress of the decoys, assuming they would land at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, awaiting orders to strike Iran.
Meanwhile, the B-2s making the actual attack fly the first 18-hour leg of their mission unnoticed, despite refueling midair multiple times along the way.
The B-2 is officially rated to carry a payload of 40,000 pounds, but for this mission, each jet carries two 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs.
As the strike B-2s approach Iran, somewhere (probably) in the Indian Ocean, an Ohio-class guided-missile submarine — believed to be the USS Georgia (SSGN‑729) — launches a volley of 30 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles at various targets in Iran.
Things get busy at 17:00 EDT, as the B-2s, Tomahawks, and various jet fighters — taking off from local airbases — all hit Iranian airspace, nearly simultaneously. Nearly 120 fighters — an impressive mix of old-school Air Force and Navy jets, plus stealthy F-22s and F-35s — have several jobs. They're there to sweep the skies of enemy jets (a threat Tehran never managed to muster), suppress enemy air defenses, perform electronic warfare to blind enemy radars and shut down enemy communications, and stay apprised of targets of opportunity.
Presumably, the Tomahawks are tasked with crippling Iranian airfields and radar.
The B-2s split up into three different flights, targeted at Iran's various underground processing facilities. Doing the 45,000-feet-in-the-air equivalent of Robin Hood putting a second bullseye'd arrow through the first one, at Fordow, each B-2 drops a second MOP bomb into the shaft created by the first one. Just to be sure.
Blind, deaf, and dumb, Iranian forces sit there, unaware that anything is up before things start going BOOM.
Everybody was on their way home — another 18-hour trip for our B-2 crews — before anybody in Tehran knew that their precious nuclear weapons program had suffered its coup de grace. Just as important, every single one of our pilots and aviators made it home.
Full details of Midnight Hammer might never be known, leaving even big-name outlets like the New York Post without much to do but recycle old reports about how the B-2 crews enjoy amenities like a toilet and a cot.
The concept for the mission, Catherine Herridge reported today, began 15 years ago when a DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) officer first identified Fordow and "recognized the US did not have a weapon to counter it." If there's one thing the Pentagon hates, it's having a juicy target in a fixed location but not having anything to hit it with.
That's when a 30,000-pound bomb able to penetrate 200 feet of soil or 60 feet of reinforced concrete was conceived, and I covered the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator — and why the B-2 is the only bomber able to carry it — in this column last week.
Originally developed in the 1980s as a Cold War counter to Soviet air defenses in case of a nuclear war, the B-2's range, payload, and stealthiness have proven invaluable time and time again since entering service in 1997. Even today, the Spirit is still so seemingly invulnerable — at least to second-rate air defenses like Iran's — that I joked on Right Angle recently that the crew's biggest worry before departing on their 36-hour mission was, "Did I pack my Kindle?"
That was on Sunday, but we must travel back now to 1941 and the Time on Target (TOT) artillery attacks were developed by the U.S. Army during early World War II training exercises. TOT was invented by serious men looking to use modern technology to correct World War I deficiencies, and generally improve our performance against the bad guys.
Historically, the problem with artillery is that it wasn't that accurate, fairly simple structures like trenches could provide good protection, and timing your fires usually worked better in theory than in practice.
One attempt at timing during WWI was called the "creeping barrage." You'd fire all of your guns just ahead of your advancing troops, forcing the bad guys to cower in their trenches instead of firing their machine guns. A creeping barrage — in theory — allowed your men to advance from just behind the safety of a wall of raining steel.
In practice? Things rarely worked so well because of limited visibility and communications.
If you stopped firing your creeping barrage too late, you might rain down artillery on your own soldiers caught out in the open. If you stopped firing too soon, enemy forces in their trenches would have time to recover — again, with your soldiers caught out in the open. Things worked out the same way if the broken terrain or enemy fire caused your soldiers to advance more slowly than the plan required.
Bad news for the good guys, no matter what.
Another method developed during WWI was area bombardment. It's exactly what it sounds like: You just keep raining massive numbers of shells down on the bad guys until you think they've been softened up enough that you can send in your infantry, or you run out of shells.
One problem with that, previously mentioned, was that trenches could provide "good enough" protection. Another is that, once your first shell landed, all the bad guys dove inside to get that protection. Successive pounding tended not to accomplish much.
Flash forward to 1941 and the U.S. Army's TOT.
Somebody — I've never found out who — had a bright idea. "What if there was an enemy position we wanted to make go bye-bye," our mystery artilleryman thought, "and we could perfectly time every gun in range so that the first huge volley of shells all hit that position at the same time?"
All you need is good maps, standardized firing tables, solid radio communications, integrated command-and-control, perfectly synchronized wristwatches, and a little math — things that either weren't around or weren't yet good enough during the previous war.
So: "If Gun A is at Position X and Gun B is at Position Y, and they both need to hit Target Z at 0938 hours, then Gun A needs to fire at 0937 and 32 seconds but Gun B needs to fire at 0937 and 24 seconds."
Now do all that math for a whole lot more than just two guns, and no pocket calculators are allowed because this is 1941, and they don't exist yet. Yes, our guys had to perform those calculations in the field using slide rules.
And Another Thing: Computers have advanced TOT techniques quite a bit over the last 20 years or so. Now called Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact (MRSI), a single computer-controlled artillery gun can put three or four shells on the same target at the same time. The gun crew fires the first shell at a high angle. Consecutive computer-controlled shots are fired at increasingly lower angles, each with a shorter time of flight. The last shell flies a flatter path and arrives on target at the same time as the first one. Nifty, eh?
Before the lethal adoption of drones in this century, artillery accounted for 70-80% of all casualties (that's dead and wounded) during the wars of the 20th century. But inflicting all that misery required firing a lot — a lot — of shells. While everybody marveled at all those smart bombs we dropped during the 1991 Gulf War, artillery remained the primary killer. An armored division from that era — with its hundreds of heavy tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and the like — still devoted about 40% of its tonnage to artillery guns and shells.
But the thing is, it's worth it because, generally speaking, you'd much rather hit the bad guys with comparatively safe indirect fire than much more dangerous direct fire. Ask an infantryman sometime if he'd like to root the enemy out of a building himself, or if maybe he'd rather take a seat and call in an artillery strike to blow up the building and everything in it from afar.
On Sunday, the U.S. Air Force blew up an underground bunker in Tehran from as far as Missouri.
The mission produced other positive outcomes — remarkable for an operation whose objective was defanging a would-be nuclear terrorist state.
Israel keeps proving — and parts of the Islamic world refuse to learn — that Russian gear is strictly second-rate. S***hole countries like Assad-era Syria and Iran insist on buying Russian air defense systems, and then get their skies owned by the Israelis. They'd be better off just making peace, reorienting westward, and getting access to primo American equipment. Sure, their armies would still be second- or third-rate, but at least they'd be at peace and own the best.
If Iran's leadership weren't genocidal maniacs, they'd see that.
The big unknown is how good Chinese gear is.
Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh is in Beijing today, reportedly meeting with officials from the Chinese Ministry of Defense. If Nasirzadeh has just one question for his Chinese counterpart, it must be, "DO YOU PLEASE HAVE ANYTHING CAPABLE OF SHOOTING DOWN THESE TRICKSY WESTERN STEALTH JETS? I'M BEGGING YOU, MAN!"
Tyler Rogoway, editor-in-chief of The War Zone, noted that "China giving Iran advanced air defenses would be a gift to U.S. intel. Leaky, especially now, and Israel will pick them apart/examine them meticulously and share that info."
"It would also complicate access into the country's airspace," he concluded, "but maybe a worthy trade."
But one thing I doubt China would agree to for those very reasons, no matter how much Tehran might plead. Midnight Hammer might have put a few dents in Chinese-Iranian relations.
It might seem a stretch to say that Midnight Hammer began in 1941. But you have to go back at least that far to find the first time our modern military looked at the limitations of indirect fires, and found a solution involving imagination, technology, and a ruthless dedication to keeping our people safe while inflicting maximum casualties on the enemy.
If it isn't exactly a straight line from TOT to Midnight Hammer, it's certainly the same mindset.
Americans were the first with the ability to put shells from every gun in range on target at once. But now we can call in multiple weapons systems from around the world and coordinate them with both pinpoint precision and split-second timing, in what military analyst (and retired Army reserve colonel) Austin Bay called "strategic time on target."
In 1941, we called it Time on Target. Last weekend, the Pentagon called it Midnight Hammer.
And to do it, all you need is nearly invisible airplanes and submarines, an aircraft carrier or three, a giant bomb that only one country has and only one plane can carry, virtually unlimited global reach, anti-radiation missiles, real-time satellite imaging, space-based global communications, near-perfect intel, and fricken laser beams.
I probably missed a few things, but the men and women who conceived, planned, and executed Operation Midnight Hammer missed nothing. They took out Iran’s nukes from half a world away—and made it look easy. That’s not just American firepower. That’s American doctrine since 1941.
Last Thursday: Pity Poor China (Really!)
