Operation Midnight Hammer was a complex mission that achieved an amazing success. Thanks to comments by chairman of the JCS, Gen. Dan Caine [https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4227082/historically-successful-strike-on-iranian-nuclear-site-was-15-years-in-the-maki/], Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, public releases, and a summary of the mission in the July/August 2026 issue of Air &Space Forces magazine [airandspaceforces.com] by Chris Gordon, p. 20-22, the facts are available. It is a shame that the news media, journalists, Democrats, and TDS Republicans refuse to acknowledge this great achievement.Â
Gen Dan Caine and Chris Gordon detail how the planning for the mission began 15 years ago when (unnamed) intelligence agencies discovered and began analyzing every step of construction of a hardened underground nuclear facility in a remote mountainous region of Iran called Fordow.Â
Per Chris Hordon, a little known agency in Ft. Belvoir, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) had a team that spent years studying the growing threat, analyzing our capabilities, and trying to develop a new weapon to counter this new threat. Peaceful uranium enrichment for civilian purposes doesn’t happen in secretive, hardened, facilities like Fordow.Â
To destroy it, they had many experts analyzing, computing, designing, simulating, and testing weapons. Do you remember the “Mother of All Bombs,” the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb? (My husband worked as a contractor in the office that planned and developed future weapons, including the MOAB, for “hardened and deeply buried targets” after he retired until I retired, too, and moved us back to SC). Well, it took years, but they created the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) for this mission.Â
Trump had the intelligence that told him he needed to strike quickly. (Do you need to question that since we knew where all their leaders were and when they were meeting? Just be glad we had sources. Israel struck Iran’s military facilities so Iran began to secure Fordow and trucks started removing stuff.Â
125 aircraft were involved, fighter escorts, bombers, tankers, support aircraft. These are amazing strike packages. We called them a “gorilla” package back in the day. 7 B-2s flew nonstop for 36 hours while 7 diversionary B-2s flew west from their bases. Th B-2s were piloted by both active duty and Missouri ANG airmen. Only the US has the ability to destroy such a hardened and deeply buried target.Â
The mission at Fordow was a success, confirmed by satellite imagery, and matching actual weapons parameters with research modeled and tested the last 15 years (weapons were “released on speed and on parameters, the weapons all guided to their intended targets and to their intended aim points, they functioned as designed—meaning they exploded,” reported Gen Caine).Â
Fordow and what was inside was destroyed by 6 B-2s, but we don’t know what the trucks removed beforehand. The Iranians had enriched uranium at other sites, too. The 7th B-2 attacked the Natanz facility. We attacked Isfahan with cruise missiles and not the MOP. Chris Gordon wrote, “A senior Israeli official said the supply of enriched uranium at Isfahan is believed to have survived, but may be buried and hard to access.” Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesman, said we believe the strikes there “degraded their program by one to two years.”Â
An article on the follow-on to the MOP and a picture of the MOP is here:
[https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-designation-next-gen-bunker-buster/]
A picture of the MOAB, modeled by my sweetie:
Red Herring (View Post):
Yeah, but it happened under Trump, so …
This has been studied and planned for fifteen years?? That is how many presidents back? Then we believe the recent operation delayed the uranium access by 1-2 years? If all their other means have been leveled, and the Israelis have been a part of this all these years, then why is the conflict continuing? Why is the Strait still closed? Why are all these cease fires so brief – and where is the rest of the world on this?
Gas companies are warning that the reserves are at an all time low and expect a world of hurt this Fall – car sales are down, prices keep going up on everything – I really think Trump got sucked into something terrible……without an exit plan-
This thread is solely about the military portion of the Iran matter, specifically the one last year’s Midnight Hammer.
The geopolitical aspects (i.e. who’s President at any given time during a 15 year period, the leadership and internal/external politics in the various relevant countries at any given time over a 15 year period, etc., etc., etc.) are outside of that.
Exactly. He pulled off something no other other country or even an alliance of countries could have pulled off. The mission was to destroy Fordow and other sites. The sites are destroyed. Unless we excavate the site hit with only cruise missiles, we and the Iranians won’t know what, if anything survived. Excavating a nuclear site is tricky. We can’t do it if Iran doesn’t cooperate. We could assume everything is destroyed but why live with uncertainty? We don’t know what remains, if anything was removed from Fordow or if anything existed that we don’t know about.Â
Don’t forget, as they analyzed the construction, they had to determine what a weapon would need to do to destroy the hardened facility. Then they had to model it on computers, then they had to test until they got it right, then they had to build them. How many were we able to build, don’t know. I do know how many they dropped, more than I thought we had. The description reads like they plagiarized Star Wars. This couldn’t happen until we had the weapons. Why Obama sent “pallets of cash” is beyond me but such an engineering activity in remote mountains would be expensive. Why is the conflict continuing? You can figure that out in my article. The Strait is still closed because of mines. The war continues because Iran refuses to cooperate. Seems it refuses to give up what it still has. We don’t know about what was removed, if any, and Iran doesn’t know what it has left, if anything.
Gas prices here are down 50 cents this week. Our parents had to endure four years of rationing. Surely we can endure Biden era prices a little longer to avoid nukes in the hands of madmen.