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MOAB story
On Sun, 16 Apr 2017 13:20:21 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote: On 4/16/2017 10:50 AM, wrote: On Sun, 16 Apr 2017 08:37:05 -0400 (EDT), justan wrote: Thats a dumb plan. Throwing away potentially good explosive devices. The old stuff still can be dropped and cause blunt force trauma even if the explosivefails. Waste not want not. It may be a dumb plan but it is how the military operates. This comes down to chemistry more than politics. Explosives definitely have a shelf life and beyond that they become unreliable. They may just be less effective but they can also become more sensitive and that is a worse problem. The exudate that oozes out of shells loaded with TNT can be very dangerous. Military explosives generally have longer shelf lives than commercial explosives but that is simply more than a few years out to 20 or so. You keep saying that and I don't disagree with you when it comes to cheap, WWII era ordnance or .45 rounds that you apparently had some experience in disposing of in 1965. But, what makes you think or what evidence do you have that today, 52 years later (half a century) that the same policy exists for $15M a pop weapons? Because TNT is still TNT? I did a lot of reading on this but I can't find anything like the CG "282" manual online that defined storage and classification of ordinance. I did see references to explosives like Semtex and RDX saying they were only at their prime for 10 years. (by a company selling a replacement) I also heard the actual production cost of the MOABs was $170k or so and you get to $16 million by dividing the $340m program cost by the 21 bombs they built. If you recycled the guidance package and just demilled the barrel bomb it guides, no doubt that would still be cheaper but I bet there is a better guidance package out there now too so it is likely to be chucked. This is DoD, a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon we are talking about real money. (Proxmire) Do you really think they are worried about a couple hundred grand? How many multi billion dollar weapons systems have we built that were designed, built, deployed and then scrapped without ever firing a shot in anger? (and I don't just mean ballistic missiles and nukes) |
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