Sa 5s News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Prevent that. >> let's go through that list as quickly as we can. a lot of your colleagues, mostly republicans, but many democrats, say give ukraine the migs. russian-made fighter jets that poland has offered and give them to ukraine. you say that is a distraction because they simply couldn't fly them effectively anyway. explain. >> well, they have a number of mig aircraft themselves and they're flying very few. that could be a combination of lack of mechanics, fuel, the safety of the pilots in the air, the lack of pilots. a much more credible way to provide for air support to the ukrainians i...

>> that's exactly right. and that's what we've seen, as you have heard the secretary of defense says that up to this point the response has been strong, and it's been effective. and it looks like for the next phase, the actual enforcement of the no-fly zone that with the exception of the shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles that there won't be a lot of threat to our forces. they'll still be -- >> those fingers or those shoulder-fired missiles, they're pretty effective and they're pretty hard to find if somebody's walking around with them. you can put them in the trunk of a car. >> i am not mea...

Much of it realistically -- and we don't know the results of the u.s. assessment right now -- but realistically, what would you think? how much of it was destroyed over the past few hours? >> you know, wolf, it's really hard to say. my guess is the sa-5s were taken down, the long-range, high-altitude interceptor missiles that would pose a problem to high-altitude, unmanned aerial vehicles. but they were not mobile. they were fixed. but maybe gadhafi has figured out a way to remote them and do other things with them. you don't always know when you first go in -- that's the reason why you may ph...

Lawrence is joining us with more details. that was a thorough briefing at the pentagon. you attended. they told us what has happened now. but they're not telling us what's next. >> reporter: that's right, wolf. but we can pretty much surmise what's going to come next. after they establish some form of air superiority, after they're confident that they have put down colonel gadhafi's air defense forces, that's when you'll start to see the no-fly zone kicking into effect. what these first strikes you're looking at now, what they were designed to do is primarily target one thing. the so-called sa...

Key communication nodes. up on the slight to my left, you'll see many of them. most of them are in the western part of the country. that's where the critical nodes are located and that's why we targeted them there. it does give us the ability specifically with taking down the long-range surface-to-air, the sa-5s, taking them down and the c-2 architecture that goes with that opens up as broad as space as possible for the no-fly zone. >> on the missiles themselves, these are these new generation technical tom hawks. >> it was a mixture of the old ones and new ones. >> do the new ones take pictur...