reporter: good morning. we expect a briefing at the pentagon in just about two hours. what we were told last night is that the briefing will begin to give more detail on the results that they were collecting overnight as to what exactly the success was. we expect to hear more about whether or not any u.s. missiles were, in fact, intercepted and shot down and rate of success about the targets. i m going to be cautious and say we expect to hear that. we were told by secretary mattis last night he wanted to see transparency oh this matter because he felt that the russians or the syrians would come out with propaganda on all of this. so we will be looking for those answers. one of the big issues right now is whether or not this situation will have a military escalation and whether the russians will take any action. what we know from last night is that the u.s. military took significant steps to try and assure the russians that the u.s. was not coming after them.
u.s. now pinned themselves in the corner? would they have to react solo? they ll try to work with the brits and the french. but i think we are locked in. there s no question about it. this is going to be like mowing the grass. the grass is going to grow back. and over time as the syrians grow more confident, maybe assad will deploy chlorine gas. he s used it more than 15 times or maybe even sarin, the nerve agent used in douma. i think there probably will be more strikes but what this was not was a three-day campaign designed to cripple, alter the battlefield balance on the ground. that was clearly not the intent here. john mccain tweeted they need to lay out goals in syria and he praised this move. do you believe are you confident that there s a solid plan moving forward? i admire and respect john
strike given the circumstances, israel obviously has said the same thing. that we need to see this international low regarding banning the u.s. of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction needs to be upheld. that is what this has upheld. you saw what the president said, the [ prime minister, the french prime minister, what general mattis and dunford have said, that this was precisely targeted against just those specific chemical weapons-related targets. they speped it up from the stepped it up from the last time. they needed to. after the last time president trump responded when assad crossed the red line, the syrians were back at it again. this comes at a time when the world seems more united against the use of these chemical weapons. not only has assad been using them with impunity, but russia, face it, the british believe that it was russia that was responsible for the nerve agent
the foreign ministry has also come out and responded. they have been looking closely at the chemical gas attacks in douma saying there s still a lot of question marks over that. and the u.s., the uk, and france should have waited until there was a more comprehensive investigation before going in. president rouhami saying that iran will stand side by side with the syrians. overall, as nick has also said, calm and quite i think many people here were expecting a bigger and more destructive attack than the one they ve seen. we ll see more of the destruction as we get more video in. thank you both. this just in from german chancellor angela merkel supporting the air strikes led by the u.s., uk, and france. i m going to read a couple of sentences here from her statement. she says, we support our american, british, and french allies as permanent members of
total of 105 weapons from the scene. president trump tweeted this morning that it was a perfectly executed strike. he thanked france and the united kingdom adding could not have had a better result. then he added these two words, mission accomplished. we ve got nbc correspondents across the region and the nation s capital. hans nichols at the pentagon. bill neely in lebanon. jeff bennett at the white house. let s start with hans nichols at the pentagon. hans, as it s daylight, coming to the end of the day until syria. there s been some chance to evaluate what s going on. we know the syrians have taken journalists around to show them zach. what is the pentagon saying about it? pentagon saying they had limited objectives and they achieved those limited objectives. think of it research facility, production and production of chemical weapons. they tried the strikes,