We fired 59 old Tomahawk cruise missiles at 1.1 million dollars a piece and destroyed 2 old Mig 23s that were being repaired. Keep in mind we did hardly any damage to the runway too.
Although it’s great for Raytheon. Now they can sell us at least more next generation Tomahawk cruise missiles.
It’s very tough to seriously damage a modern hardened runway with anything but munitions designed to do so, which really takes bombs made for that sort of thing, from aircraft. So far as I know, we’ve not claimed we tried to put the runways out of commission. The only pics I’ve seen look like we hit something ON the one runway.
Are you saying we should have bombed with aircraft?
It really doesn’t matter: Even if the runways were very seriously damaged, temporary repairs would take a couple days at most. Now, if we’d hit several more airfields, all with runway busting bombs, then the Syrians might have a bit of a problem.
The Syrian Army itself reported “extensive” damage. Russian TV (an on scene correspondent) said 9 planes were destroyed, we claim “up to 20.” Where are you getting “2”?
For certain, several concrete hangars WERE seriously damaged, the point being that while our warning to Russia may have allowed the Syrians to get the most valuable planes to safety, without our “heads up”, they’d have been toast. This was a warning, somewhat akin to Kirk having the Enterprise stun a bunch of thugs in “A Piece of the Action”.
As this sort of warning goes, $60-$70 million is pretty cheap.