The Mother of All Games

Only a few people know what a “GBU-43/B” is. A bunch more will figure it out if we use the official designation: “Massive Ordnance Air Blast,” or “MOAB.” Now you get it: It’s informally referred to as the “Mother of All Bombs,” and that designation is nothing but great PR for the military.

It’s called that, as we all know by now, because it’s the biggest conventional weapon in the U.S. armed forces arsenal. News anchors couldn’t say “Mother of All Bombs” often enough as they breathlessly described how, for the first time ever in combat, a lumbering American plane dropped one onto an ISIS network of caves in Afghanistan. KABLOOEY!

President Donald Trump wouldn’t say if he had personally authorized the use of the behemoth, but he has certainly discovered of late that being president means you can mess around with a lot of toys. Just a few days earlier, he lobbed a bunch of cruise missiles at Syria. The strategic effect of that attack is debatable, but there is no debating that the Syrian bombardment slowed his precipitous slide into the solid waste of ridicule. Now he looked more like a commander in chief, so he followed up by dropping that huge Mother.

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