Sort of. The reason that they are much more powerful for a given weight class (vs other warhead designs), is that since they are designed to use atmospheric oxygen as the oxidizer in the reaction they can freely dedicate their entire weight / volume to carrying just the fuel. as they are designed to disperse / atomize the fuel at some height above the ground and then after it mixes and spreads sufficiently with the air, ignite the mixture.
Which of course has explosive results, this of course causes a massive pressure wave, on the order of 40x the store’s fuel weight in TNT, which when compounded with the Airburst unalive’s things in a very big radius, its very effective against manned structures and fortifications as the pressure spike & later drop can have a deadly impact on anything that has lungs since they really don’t deal with it too well even at an extended distance even including those outside direct line of sight.
The reason why they are specialist stores is that they are incredibly sensitive to dispersal & ignition timings, and release conditions and so have a tendency to not do much if something goes wrong.
I remember reading World War Z and towards the beginning the military used all its fancy stuff, including fuel air bombs. One of the soldiers (book is written as a series of interviews after zombie war by a journalist) recounts how any zombie with lungs hanging from their mouth was a “veteran” of that battle
the CBU-55 is a FAE cluster that was used to clear landing zones for helicopters
it had 3 clusters in it and its said that each cluster has the explosive power of a 500lbs GP bomb
so 1 CBU-55 has the same firepower as a stack of 3x 500lbs bombs being released.
Not only that, this is the last model, the OV-10D+, which had the ability to use laser guided APKWS (As of operation desert storm), if it can use laser guided munitions, it would be a literal joke it didn’t have CCIP.
