President Harry S. Truman authorized the first nuclear attack in the history of the world, on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. The bomb exploded with the force of more than 15,000 tons of TNT.
But the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its supporting strike group launched the “largest airstrike in the history of the world” from an aircraft carrier on Somalia in February, said Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s acting chief of naval operations, while speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership on Monday.
The strike involved 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets that launched from the Truman as the carrier strike group operated in the Red Sea, a Navy official told The Intercept on condition of anonymity. When it was over, Somalia had been pummeled by around 125,000 pounds of munitions, according to Kilby. Those 60 tons of bombs killed just 14 people, according to Africa Command, or AFRICOM.
A Navy official clarified that Kilby’s “off the cuff” remarks did not mean the airstrike was comparable to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II or even other massive bombing raids like President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Linebacker II raids in North Vietnam, also known as the “Christmas bombings.”
“This was a time span of minutes, it was everything hitting, and all of it coming from one aircraft carrier. That’s historically significant.”
Other strikes from aircraft carriers have been larger in terms of bomb tonnage dropped during a single day, including during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and during the Afghan War, according to the official. “It’s the effort from a single carrier in such a short time span,” he said, noting that the Hornets each struck their target in rapid succession. “This was a time span of minutes, it was everything hitting, and all of it coming from one aircraft carrier. That’s historically significant.”
The official refused to offer further information, which he said would constitute “tactical details.”
At the time of the mega-strike in the Horn of Africa, AFRICOM downplayed the scale of the attack using boilerplate language. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command conducted airstrikes against ISIS-Somalia on Feb. 1, 2025,” reads the press release. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS-Somalia operatives were killed in the airstrikes and no civilians were harmed.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also offered a similarly blasé assessment of the mammoth bombing at the time.
AFRICOM did not respond to requests for clarification about why it took 60 tons of bombs to kill less than 15 militants, but it was likely the type and location of the target: a series of cave complexes in the rugged terrain of the Golis Mountains in the north of Somalia.
In the months since the strike, two F/A-18 jets have fallen off the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman. In both incidents, personnel were injured in the course of the accident, and the approximately $60 million warplanes were lost to the sea.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has ramped up the conflict in Somalia, despite running as an anti-war candidate and pitching himself as a “peacemaker.”
After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled. Counts of civilian casualties published by the U.S. military and independent organizations across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump has again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes outside conventional war zones.
During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on air attacks. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.”
The Trump administration even boasted about its growing body count in Somalia on Monday.
“WWFY/WWKY: We will find you, and we will kill you.”
“We haven’t forgotten the threat posed by Jihadis. 10 more were permanently removed from the battlefield in Somalia yesterday,” the White House posted on X above black-and-white footage that shows a bomb dropped on men innocuously walking in a rural area. “That brings the total to over 100 bloodthirsty terrorists killed since President Trump was sworn in.” The administration added: “WWFY/WWKY: We will find you, and we will kill you.”
The White House did not respond to requests for additional information about the strike or civilian casualties resulting from the attacks that have killed more than 100 people in Somalia since January 20. AFRICOM recently stopped providing civilian casualty assessments in its press releases announcing U.S. attacks in Somalia. “As the new administration settles in, we’re refraining from reporting estimated battle damage assessments and providing initial assessments on civilian harm probability as a matter of course,” AFRICOM spokesperson Lt. Col. Doug Halleaux told Antiwar.com last week.
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”
The Intercept’s investigation revealed that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but has not received a response.
The United States has been conducting attacks in Somalia since at least 2007, with airstrikes skyrocketing during Trump’s first term. From 2007 to 2017, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. military carried out 43 declared airstrikes in Somalia. During Trump’s first term, AFRICOM conducted more than 200 air attacks against members of al-Shabab and the Islamic State group. The Biden administration conducted 39 declared strikes in Somalia over four years.
The U.S. has carried out almost 30 airstrikes in Somalia during Trump’s second term, according to AFRICOM and White House announcements. At this pace, AFRICOM is poised to equal or exceed the highest number of strikes in Somalia in the command’s history, 63 in 2019.
AFRICOM did not reply to detailed questions regarding attacks in Somalia prior to publication.
The U.S. war in Somalia has ground on since the opening days of the war on terror. Special Operations forces were dispatched there in 2002, followed by conventional forces, helicopters, surveillance aircraft, outposts, and drones. By 2007, the Pentagon recognized that there were fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa, and Somalia became another forever war stalemate. By the end of his first term, Trump was ready to call it quits on the sputtering war in Somalia, ordering almost all U.S. troops out of the country in late 2020.
The withdrawal was reversed by President Joe Biden but the tiny ISIS-Somalia faction remains “a significant threat to peace and security in Somalia,” while the larger militant group, al-Shabab, “continues to carry out complex attacks against the Government, [African Union Transition Mission in Somalia] and international forces, as well as civilians and the business community, including inside protected areas in Mogadishu,” according to a panel of experts report on Somalia issued late last year for the U.N. Security Council.
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s about-face on the war from the end of his first term to the beginning of his second and the goal of the strikes on Somalia. The White House also declined to respond to the question of whether if Trump was committed to winning the nearly quarter-century-old war in Somalia and, if so, when.
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