against syria. pentagon correspondent barbara starr joins me by phone. reporter: i don t think it will be a big surprise to people. now that a strike appears to be days off, the pentagon will look at the fire warships with the tomahawk missiles and figure out if they need to swap out fresh ships, fresh crews. they can t leave everybody just sitting there forever because a lot of these ships may be due to return to their home port. people are due back to their families. officials tell us that it is routine. they are going to look at it all, make decisions in the next few days and that it will not affect military operations. they ve already told the president that everybody will be ready to go, missiles will be targeted and everything will be ready at all times for him. that doesn t mean that they may not swap some ships out and put
developments on the situation in syria. you just heard the president say that the united states does not plan to send troops there. that really leaves air strikes as the most likely response to the assad regime s use of chemical weapons. we bring in pentagon correspondent barbara starr. if the president gave the order, how soon would the military be ready to go? reporter: the military says, especially with the fire warships say they are ready very quickly to go. what this waits for now, john, is an execute order from the president, the president saying go. once that happens, the order goes to the pentagon and goes out to commanders in the fleet and they will be ready very quickly because these cruise missiles that would theoretically launch of a these five warships, they are guided to their targets by satellite coordinates. so a lot of this is already preprogrammed to go after those syrian targets that the president knows are the military option on the table. syrian targets command