Coalition air forces continue busy pace

  • Published
  • By Senior Master Sgt. Rick Burnham
  • Air Force Print News
WASHINGTON --  As dramatic scenes of liberation dominate media coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom, coalition air forces continue to contribute significant behind-the-scenes efforts in the three-week-old war.

Among them is the reported delivery of the massive ordnance air-blast bomb to an undisclosed site in Southwest Asia. The weapon is available for use by coalition commanders, officials from U.S. Central Command said April 10 during their daily press briefing at their forward headquarters in Qatar.

Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart, CENTCOM director of operations, stopped short of revealing any possible uses for the 21,000-pound bomb, sometimes referred to as the "mother of all bombs."

"It is available to us to use anywhere that is appropriate," he said. "But we leave that to the commanders on the battlefield to make a recommendation both on targets and applicable weapons."

The MOAB, deployed on a pallet from a C-130 Hercules, was highlighted by the Department of Defense during a pre-war March 11 test at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the time that the bomb could potentially give opposition fighters something additional to think about.

"The goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there is an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight against the coalition," he said March 11.

While reporters pondered the potential deployment of the MOAB by C-130 aircraft, another airlifter, the C-17 Globemaster III, was busy delivering key ground capability to secure the Haditha Dam on the Euphrates River. Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy operations officer for CENTCOM, said that by delivering ground forces to the area, the C-17s relayed a key message to the forces of Saddam Hussein's crumbling regime.

"This is really a very good example of the flexibility of the forces that are involved in this operation," Brooks said. "It shows that an even greater set of options now exists to defeat the remnants of the regime."

Coalition air forces continued to communicate with Iraqi citizens as well with its daily barrage of informational leaflets, Renuart said.

"We continue our efforts in communicating with the Iraqi population by delivering leaflets by hand and by air," he said. "At this point, we have distributed more than 43 million leaflets overall, including more than 1 million on April 9."