US Looking at Bigger Bomb, Navy SEALs Mothership for Persian Gulf - East Idaho News
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US Looking at Bigger Bomb, Navy SEALs Mothership for Persian Gulf

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GETTY W 010512 NavalDrillsIran?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1327845007554Ebrahim Noroozi/AFP/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Two high profile weapons systems are getting critical attention as the United States trades verbal barbs with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz.

The Navy SEALs are scheduled to receive a “special operations mothership” in the Persian Gulf that will search for mines and adversaries. Set to be retired just weeks ago, the 40-year-old U.S.S. Ponce is now on a fast-track rebuild to act as a floating U.S. base in the Persian Gulf.

In the long term, it’s going to be a mothership for special operations forces that will allow the U.S. to covertly deploy our special operations warriors to really difficult parts of the world where you don’t want people on shore like Yemen and Somalia, military analyst Steve Ganyard told ABC News.

Ganyard said that in the short term, the United States is trying to “create a platform where we can put mine-hunting helicopters and keep them permanently based in the Strait of Hormuz so that if the Iranians do something stupid like try to put sea mines in and try to close off the Strait of Hormuz—thereby closing off 20 percent of the world’s global oil supplies—we can quickly get in there and reopen the straits.”

The Ponce is being enhanced with cranes to pull mines and the ability to dock 12 small boats. The renovated ship will have space for four helicopters, four video teleconference rooms, and an on board operations center.

Meanwhile, the defense department is being forced to rework a 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordinance penetrator, or, in military terms, the MOP. The MOP is the military’s largest conventional bomb, a super “bunker-buster” capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground.

The MOP is a massive bomb—20 feet long and encased in 3.5-inch thick high-performance steel. It is designed to penetrate up to 200 feet underground before exploding.

But initial tests indicated that the bunker-buster may not be able to destroy some of Iran’s facilities, according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and so the Pentagon submitted a request to Congress this month for funding to work on the bomb’s capabilities.

“We were building a bomb to one level of depth deep inside a granite mountain and now we need to go even deeper. We have to have that conventional capability to deter them from doing anything that might precipitate a war,” Ganyard said.

The Defense Department has already spent about $330 million to develop about 20 of the bunker-buster bombs, and the Pentagon is requesting about $82 million more to make the bomb more effective, according to government officials briefed on the plan, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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