2025 Israel - Iranian conflict

FairAndUnbiased

Brigadier
Registered Member
If it’s dropped by a B-2 it’s very unlikely it gets shot down, the B-2 is stealth and to my knowledge Iran has zero stealth radars capable of tracking them. Now if it’s dropped by a B-52 it’s more likely to be shot down but if it’s flying with F-35s the F-35s can shoot down the AD systems
It's a 10 km range weapon. Its not 1991 anymore, something of that kind of poor kinematics moving into knife fight range isn't surprising anymore.

If the B-2 was launching standoff missiles yeah it will never get shot down. But this isn't a standoff missile.

Detection range is proportional to 4th root of RCS.

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Even a 10^-6 RCS improvement (1 million times smaller RCS than baseline) reduces detection range to 3% of baseline. Say from 300 km against unstealthy targets to 9 km. Right inside the bunker buster drop radius.
 

lube

Junior Member
Registered Member
MOP penetration based on openly known information and using the penetration equation would be something closer to 8 meters on decently hard rock, instead of the 60m that the media is claiming which is true but for more cooperative surfaces such as silty clay or dirt.

MOPs could very easily seal entrances and exits, vents, access tunnels etc with one or two hits. But to penetrate the facility which is estimated to be under 80-90m of rock and has a possibly further hardened shell, you would need 10 successive hits for penetration , possibly 8 successive hits to start doing internal damage (assuming the penetration ability doesn't decrease with successive hits, but I'm not sure about that - probably nobody has tried this many successive hits).

With some error probability accounted for you would need 8-10 B-2 sorties carrying 2 MOPs each to seal off the access tunnels and get a complete penetration. 6-7 Sorties if you just want to penetrate and thus don't care about sealing tunnels. 3-4 sorties if you don't want full penetration but think sealing the facility shut will be fine.

Honestly the numbers aren't too absurd, and in my opinion not out of the American reach if they really do decide to shut the facility down. In the end it would depend on their internal assessment on how effective they think MOPs will be and how much risk they're willing to digest to run these sortie numbers.
I believe the new talking point is that the GBU-57 has been successively upgraded way past its known numbers since 2009 and they've tested it on a mockup facility before...
But probably a scale model. And I think the physics of successive penetrators hitting the same spot will look very different from the other instance of it happening, in Beirut? Since the geology and depth is much too different.
 

delfer

New Member
Registered Member
AD engagement over Tel Aviv, probably won't see any exact footage the censorship is getting tighter every day

More like attempted engagement. Some successful, I'm sure, but as the interceptors self-destruct when they fail to hit their target, people automatically think that all the little explosions high up in the sky are the AD rockets intercepting the enemy rockets.
 
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