of al qaeda, the parent group. you have the different element going on. still have 2,000 american forces on the ground in syria. president trump only two week ago, saying that he wanted to pull american forces out. suddenly, he is learning very quickly that that is easier said than done. and soap th so that s where you stand tonight. tonight. either see u.s. involvement in the syrian war getting more entrenched or seeing that at least the civil war is going to continue in capacity. vivian, thank you, live in washington, d.c. as we mentioned. we heard conflicting information from the president. and the pentagon. over whether this was a sustained response or a one time shot. with me to discuss this military angle. colonel jack jab onjacobs. good to have you this evening. let s delve into what by most people s assessments watched the developments over the past couple hours. two messages out of the white house.
come on, hans. number one, is the national link at least harry reid and others relied on for why the program exists reporter: look at the name of the program. advanced aviation threat. when the military is up there, they see something they don t understand. the time reported when they saw this, they thought, look, maybe these are some competitors, adversaries who have capability that defies physics, as the pilots say. so the initial impetus was it was something they didn t understand and they wanted to learn more about. there will be a lot of questions about this. you can see questions coming up from capitol hill. for any of the sailors and pilots thar pilots from 2004, if this became a legend on the aircraft carrier, there are a lot of sources that could be talking. i suspect this will get a lot more attention. there is not just the national security angle, the military angle, but the political angle, too.
these are things that china both fears and has some control over. ian, is there a coherent north korea policy right now? i think that the actual implementation of policy is pretty coherent. let s keep in mind that the north koreans after the americans made it pretty rough and credible that you come towards guam, we re really going to hit you back, kim jong-un backed off pretty quickly. define that policy. that means that we set some sort of red line which is guam i guess, and they take notice. is that how it s working? a couple things. one, it means that we are going to consistently talk the military angle, that if this really falls apart, we re running out of time, this isn t going to last through the next administration, you can t kick the can anymore, so either you get enough sanctions, enough pressure on north korea that we actually see them change their behavior, or there is a possibility that there s going to be a military attack. now, i don t think that we would engage m
we will be coming back to you. let s talk a little bit about the military angle we may hear discussed when the president and members of his national security council come out that side door and take their places around this podium there. jack jacobs, retired u.s. army colonel, recipient of the medal of honor in the vietnam war and our military affairs analyst, jack, what can, i know you have been asked this before, what can the president do militarily if it was you and him and he was coming to you asking for a list of options? not very much, quite frankly. at the end of the day, it s interesting that isis is rooted in territory. you can t have a caliphate unless you control territory. so just bombing discriminately even will not get you where you want to go. you actually have to control the territory that isis wants to control. that s going to take people on the ground. we are not going to put our
flying higher than that for a while. but it also spent part of its time at a fairly low altitude. all right, well, thank you very much for the weather angle of this. we go back to the military angle. i ve been wanting to say all day there s no way there isn t a gps transponder on this. somebody knows exactly where it is. and jim has more information on that front? just moments ago, an official from norad in colorado was briefing pentagon reporters here, via a phone conference. at the very beginning of his brief, he stopped to say, we just got word that the aerostat is, in fact, down. it s down in montour county in pennsylvania, which is right next to columbia county where it apparently skipped across the countryside, and the tail that it was dragging, took out a lot of power lines and darkened the homes of tens of thousands of people. now, according to the officials,