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Doing so. general mccaffrey, what do you make of the initial reports of what went on tonight of you and colonel jacobs have been talking about defining the mission. do you feel that was reached tonight? >> look, brian, i think on balance, it was a very competent military operation commanded by general votel in tampa, florida. i thought the president's statement was well crafted and straightforward. secretary mattis and general dunford unsurprisingly were coherent and focused. it's worth underscoring that this was a very, very limited strike both in the scope and probably more importantly in th...

Harvard educated lawyer, msnbc, national security analyst. jeremy, what is the light in which you are viewing the size and scope of tonight's strike, what it was, what it wasn't? >> brian, great that we worked with our al lies. great that it was, proportionate. but i am just struck by how narrow the target set was. we selected three targets. it was a one time shot. to use secretary mattis'lingo from the podium. it was a one day operation. we could have used this opportunity in the parlance of the pentagon to, to not waste the crisis. and really degrade assad's military ability to wage war on h...

A straight-up mistake. he gave away the element of surprise in a perfect world, no one would have said a thing. no schedules would have been changed. a few meetings would have happened. the element of surprise would have happened three days ago. the surprise is when bombs start blowing up in damascus. so that is usually how we have done it. every president, every leader has their style. and there is always an announcement. as a matter of fact when we got word that the president was going to make an announcement in 30 minutes, that meant the weapons were flying, we know that, the russians know ...

Engage u.s., british or french ships or missiles. secretary mattis were any of the strikes tonight intended to kill bashar al assad? >> the only action i'm aware of is surface to air missiles. i happened to be down at the military command center. i'm not aware of any russian committee or the scope of the syrian regime at this time. those are details we'll pull together for you in the morning. >> the targets again were specifically designed to degrade the syrian war machine's ability to create chemical weapons and to set that back right now. there were no attempts to broaden or expand that targ...

>> there's concern about that. there's also concerns about getting drawn into the mire, the muck that is the syrian civil war. and it's one of the reasons that people ought to be really careful about taking -- getting rid of assad or weakening him. but what courtney just laid out is the u.s. options. there's punitive options that even twice what we did last year, we shoot off 100 cruise missiles. they want to use chemicals again they will in a week or two. there's not a great target set. there's the risk you talk about again, i say don't just think punitively, think long-term. think about ways...