ICYMI: Tit for Tat Strikes in the Mideast
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, on Saturday afternoon when news broke that B-2 bombers, these are the only jets that are capable of deploying those 30,000 pound bunker busting munitions, were heading west from their base in Missouri across the Pacific to

I spoke to my dad on the phone. He's an aviation enthusiast. He grew up on Air Force bases. And we were both kind of puzzled. Like, why would bombers be heading west in order to mobilize for a strike on Iran? It seemed like the wrong way. Well, it turns out, as we know now, these were decoy B-2 bombers. Well, those planes got all the attention. Another group of B-2s flew east, literally flying.

under the radar. For more on the operation, we bring in Tony Capascio, Bloomberg News Pentagon and national security reporter. He writes about the 37 hour operation, so-called Midnight Hammer. He joins us from our Washington, D.C. bureau. We're going to get to the operation details in a second. And the planes, the

aircraft that were used, the submarine, the ordinance in a minute. But I want to get to what the president said on True Social a couple hours ago. He said, "The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed and everyone knows it. Only the fake news would say anything different in order to try and demean as much as possible." Is that what our reporting tells us, that the sites that were hit in Iran were totally destroyed? Do we know that yet?

No, we don't know that yet. Battle damage assessment takes sometimes weeks for a measured, informed analysis. He was shooting from the hip. There's no way he would have known that. General Kane, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman on Sunday, was pretty measured in that area.

in his assessment, the president was exaggerating. There's no way he would know that. Totally obliterated. It's just off the charts wrong at this point. It may be in two weeks from now, but

yeah he was blowing smoke and you know he takes a shot at the fake media but we some of us remember the iraq war going in the reasons why and all the intelligence was kind of leaning in george bush's favor maybe possibly could be they have it it turns out they didn't so there's always a measure of skepticism when somebody claims

battle damage assessments were spectacular like an hour or two after the operation. So sorry. - I was watching the press conference yesterday live, Tony, on Bloomberg Television, our special coverage, and I think I saw you in the audience at the Pentagon. Were you there? - I was there. I had an off-purple shirt in the front row next to Jennifer Griffin of Fox. - So you heard it straight from the horse's mouth, essentially, about the battle damage assessment.

Right. This is very nascent, though. It was like hours after the operation. He was measured. I thought his answers were good. I thought Defense Secretary Hexit, while he gave an advertisement for Trump early on, he did a good job of stage managing and fielding questions.

So to be fair, right, like I always wonder like how good is really our intelligence in terms of where things are, where they are on the ground. And I also do think about, Tony, what's going on behind the scenes because nobody wants nuclear material floating out in the atmosphere. And so I just wonder, again, going to kind of the orchestration aspect.

of the moves that we are seeing, this fine dance, you know, Israel, Iran, the U.S., Iran back in Qatar. So I don't know, how are you looking at how all of this has kind of been carried out?

Well, it's been carried out fairly flawlessly in terms of the mechanics of command and control in a combined operation. Your question's a good one, but I think the weapon-earing was informed greatly by Israeli intelligence in terms of their assessment of what their weapons could do and how deeply buried the enriched uranium material was. That had to all be factored into.

the way the U.S. calibrated our bomb drops in terms of the GPS coordinates, the aim points, how deep they were going to go. I mean, the science of weapon earring, while it's a black art, is pretty precise within the Pentagon. This is one thing they do pretty well, at least knowing where their weapons go. Thank goodness for GPS. Yeah, absolutely right. What I wonder is how much

Was the U.S. military possibly willing to take the risk that they might hit a nuclear facility and that there might be uranium or nuclear unleashed into the atmosphere? I'm just curious how good the intel was that they knew exactly what they were doing.

In this case, I think the intel was pretty good. I mean, one indication, the Istafan facility was not hit by massive ordnance penetrators. It apparently has more sensitive nuclear materials in there. And I'm not going to act like I'm a total expert on this, but it was struck by Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the Arabian Sea from the submarine with the Carl Vinson Group. Those don't penetrate deeply, but my assessment is

that they at least followed damage caused by Israeli weapons. They didn't go as deep, but they caused damage at that facility that could have been more significant in terms of a release of nuclear materials. Again, I don't want to overplay what I know, but that's my impression.

Tony, the GBU-57s, the massive ordnance penetrator bombs that have the first time they've ever been used in combat that were dropped on Fordow and other areas, 14 of them. Do you know how many the U.S. actually has of these? I've seen reporting that indicate that only 20 of these are.

existed, but I understand this stuff is obviously classified. What do we know? Yeah, it's a handful in the 20s, maybe mid-20s. I've been writing about this bomb for quite a number of years, and it's very, very classified. In fact, I've got some of the emails that were leaked to me about people not wanting to talk to me about the bomb.

But, interesting enough, there's a base in, there's an ammunition facility in Oklahoma, McAllister Ammunition Base. They make Army 155 rounds. Well, they're being retooled this year to help build more of these MOPS at a more rapid pace so that we can build up our inventories. So deep in the heart of Oklahoma, I'm sure they're working overtime to pull together the barrels that will be filled by Boeing in the coming months to replenish the supply.

What is considered a fully replenished supply? I'm thinking in the 20s there, 20s, 30s. Okay. There's now like hundreds of these things. Hey, you know, one thing that was puzzling to me also was why the B2s were or are right now based in Missouri rather than at Diego Garcia. The trips wouldn't have been as long. And why didn't they land at Diego Garcia? Why did they go all the way back to Missouri? The whole landing sequence there, they would have been spotted there at Diego Garcia.

The whole point of this was to show the long arm of the United States. Landing, they could have done that, but then there would have been pictures of it. There would have been more operational security issues. I think the brilliance of this one and this aspect of it was the feint to the west, while those B-2s that actually hit Iran, they took off at midnight Saturday morning.

The stories about the B-2s going west started breaking about 11:30 a.m. Eastern time Saturday. So this was their version, the Air Force's version of Operation Mincemeat in the Sky. You guys are off Broadway, so you know the play. Well, how do you fly six or 12 of these from Whiteman in Missouri at midnight without people around the airport, plane spotters, realizing this is happening?

There's no planes. This is not a this is an isolated base. They're not like sitting in their cars waiting for these things to fly off. This is this is our grand jewel bomber. And online and they can't be tracked online because they don't use the they don't send out the signal that is being tracked. That's right. Irrespective of the radar.

The point here is that these plane trackers, they were fooled. The crews on those bombers going west were talking. They wanted to be spotted. They wanted to be detected. That's all part of the mincemeat ruse in this case. Going east, the bombers were doing their thing. They were being radio silent and talking.

So nobody could pick him up. I mean, it was a pretty smart move on the Air Force's part. You know, I don't know whether it's I'm just thinking a lot about the U.S. military, the military parade that President Trump had on his birthday. And I'm just thinking about what just happened over the weekend. What is it that kind of I think U.S. citizens need to understand about U.S. military and our capabilities? Well, the capabilities that you spend like one hundred sixty billion dollars a year on procurement often work.

While the optics of the president and his parade are disheartening to many, many, the weapons that we have actually have been working pretty well in the last few years. You can fight about the war. You can argue about the war, the cause. But the hardware has been working well. The B-2, you may remember 20 some odd years ago, it was reviled heavily.

on the myth that it can't fly in the rain, it can't do an operation in the rain. Well, the Air Force debunked that. It's a $2 billion bomber. It was criticized at the time. Every operation it's been involved in, though, it's been pretty darn effective. It's perhaps

going to be continue to be in service until the 2030s but it's supposed to be replaced by the b-21 raider which had its first flight in november of 2023 how close is this to replacing the capabilities of the b-2 and what are the differences the main difference with the b the the current the b-21 it's going to be able to control drones basically it's going to have wing wingman

it's going to be able to have unmanned wingman. That's a big difference. It's stealthier. The B-2 is decades old. Its skin has to be highly touched up. It has a lot of problems with skin, with the blisters and stealthy materials, low observable materials, maintaining that. The B-21s is a quantum leap better than that, and it's going to be able to carry large...

more ordinance than the B-2. But it's going to be a quarterback in the sky, so the Air Force says. We don't know much about it because it's highly classified. Every little twist of this thing they keep secret, except some of the broad cost figures and some of the very...

measured pictures that come out of flight tests. We love getting inside your brain, man. Come on anytime. Tony Capasio, he is Pentagon and national security reporter at Bloomberg News. He's there in our D.C. bureau. Do you want to mention a headline crossing the Bloomberg? A divided U.S. Supreme Court lifted a judge's order that required President Trump's administration to give people 10 days notice and a chance to object before they are deported.

courted to a so-called third country. Over three dissents, the high court granted an emergency request from the administration, which said the order from a Massachusetts federal judge usurped presidential authority and interfered with diplomatic efforts again. That is a win for the Trump administration.

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Thank you.

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