night sky. they re watching for missile strikes, bombs, other explosions. they ve reported tonight that syrian air defense forces have launched counterstrikes against the american, french, and british aggression on syria. as keir simmons was explaining, syria does actually have fairly sophisticated air defense system. they ve got the s-300 and s-400 air defense systems, both of which are russian systems. some of those are manned by syrian military personnel. others are manned by russian military personnel. in the case of the russian air defenses those are there purportedly to defend significant numbers of russian personnel who are in uniform in syria. and as richard was just explaining, there s also significant numbers of russian personnel who are not in uniform in syria, which also complicates the geopolitical picture here. as u.s. and french and british forces launch these strikes tonight, obviously the intent as voiced by france and the uk and the united states is to hit the assad
picked out as the most likely targets for us to use. so not a more likely to be not a one-shot deal like it was in april but a couple of not a sustained attack but a couple of days worth of attacks. colonel jack, one last question for you. and if you do not want to answer this question, you absolutely do not have to and you can just say good night. but i m wondering when decisions like this are made, obviously this gas attack that these strikes are a response to happened last week. the president said early in the week that the missiles were coming, get ready russia. we ve been expecting, you know, here at nbc news, we ve been standing by all week long every night thinking about when these things might happen. they have been launched tonight. when these decisions are made about both the goal and the timing, are there considerations given to the perceived motivations of the president? obviously when the united states
thank you. we re now going to go to moscow. nbc news foreign correspondent keir simmons is up in the middle of the night for us in moscow. keir, thank you very much for joining us tonight. these strikes have been announced by the president in conjunction with the uk and france. obviously assad s greatest allies in syria are iran and russia and the russia factor here cuts a lot of different directions. what can you tell us about the response tonight in moscow. reporter: well, it was interesting to hear you reporting athat syrian television say syrian air defenses are engaging i think you said against these strikes by the u.s., britain, and france. that s interesting. there are two forms of air defenses in syria. s-300, s-400. they are all russian. but one group of the air defenses are manned by syrians. the other air defenses are manned by russians. those russian air defenses are ostensibly there to protect the
including aircraft to safe locations and my guess one of the reasons we ve waited is so that the russians would have an opportunity to move their stuff away. but probably air bases near damascus and helicopters in particular. when the president used the word sustained to talk about this response, did that say anything to you about the scope of this campaign or how long it might last? yeah, we ve been talking about that for some time in discussions with other people who ve been looking at it come to the same conclusion. you remember back in april when we launched the attacks with the 59 cruise missiles, that was a one-shot deal. it was pretty much toward one target. and trump telegraphed what he was going to do a couple of days ago when he was discussing it in public. what you re probably going to have here are several days worth of attacks and multiple targets that we ve picked out that the defense department has
united states not being drawn further into this conflict that involves russia and iran on the ground. we have heard that the administration has wanted a larger response to the attack last weekend than we saw in april 2017. april 2017 that was really meant to send a signal, send a message. look at the targets. they popped up on one syrian military air field. they popped it up, they hit some of the aircraft. it had an impact on the military but it was really short-lived. it was pretty cheap and pretty quick for them to rebuild that runway. they had other aircraft. and they were able to use russian military aircraft, frankly, to take over some of these operations. it did not have a long-term strategic impact on the ground in syria. so now that bashar al assad has used chemicals again killing more than 40 people reportedly from u.s. officials i ve spoken