there s a sense of urgency, because they ve been putting on a lot of pressure to give up command and control to someone else. right, the president said admiral mullen said early on. the secretary of defense gates said early on it will be a matter of days, not weeks br the u.s. turns days they keep say days not weeks, so we ll see if they can make that arrangement today. that s what the white house would like. they ve been working feverishly around the clock to achieve it, because the president wants to see someone else take charge, not necessarily the united states. wolf blitzer, thanks so much. coming up, you growing fears that libya could become a breeding ground for al qaeda
pentagon is saying, they re giving up command and control eventually, the details being worked out, though that deal could break down, but at the end of the day, if the united states is still heavily involved, what s the difference on whether they have command or control? the key thing is, joe, the u.s. very much does not want to be the lead for a sustained effort in libya. if you look at this, what happened over the course of the last few days is the united states had a very prominent lead. a number of tasks had to be taken care of and they had to be done by u.s. assets. stealth b-2 bombers, a lot of cruise missiles, some cruise missiles were launched by the brits as well, but a lot were front-loaded. we re now at the point where there literally and legitimately could be a transition. the u.s. is four score behind that. the problem exists that the united states will continue to have a prominent role as you ve
each other where nato and this coalition of countries that decided to intervene in libya will maintain a stalemate where there s no air power directed at civilian targets in libya but a house to house swipe. how long will this situation go on and when does nato decide, we ve kind of done our job here, we re done. hala, let me go to arwa damon in libya on the ground there. i think arwa, the first question for you is, does the resistance in that country even care whether it s nato, the u.s., france, anybody else leading the air strikes? no, joe, at this stage they do not. what they do care about is that the air strikes continue, that the no-fly zone continue. another thing that they care about is receiving weapons and equipment because we do see them very outgunned. they do not have the military experience. we re also seeing on the various front lines right now despite those air strikes, they are
needs to be we still need to do some more work on. you think two weeks? three weeks? a month? any idea at all? i would not hazard to get that at this particular point, but we would have more clarity as the days progress. one more follow-up. the french say they shot a libyan war plane after it landed at misrata. does the coalition, the u.s., have any idea that plane came from? where it had been, if it was even in the air? we don t have the details just yet. we have not received from the french, the pilots, the aircrews mission reports, so we re waiting for that information. sir, can you shed more light on the air-to-ground activity? it seems like you re not you re going after mand and control.
welcome back. we are still waiting for the u.n. secretary-general to come to the microphone. he is going to update us on a deal that we believe has been struck between the key coalition countries conducting the but we were expecting him about 45 minutes ago. meantime we have wolf blitzer joining us now. are you there? where are you, wolf? i m here, joe, can you hear me? so take a look at this. i guess we first would want to talk to you just a bit about your perspective on what is going on right now in libya, and this talk now of nato taking over this operation. a lot will depend, joe and hala, on the details. as they say, the devil is in the details. we ll get those details. it s not just a nato operation. there are several countries who are involved who are not nato members and there are several members of nato not very happy