syrian regime has now. you made lots of assessment, you have good idea and lots of target. in comparison. there s still a residual element. i believe we took the heart of it out. i m not going to say they are unable to continue to conduct a chemical attack in the future. i suspect they will think long and hard about it based on the activities last night. we have time for a couple more questions. president trump tweeted about an hour ago, mission accomplished, you are saying if, you know, you have left the option open for future strikes in case chemical weapons are used again. could you recognize those statements, mission accomplished and if there are other strikes does secretary have to go to secretary trump or can he carry them out as he sees fit?
sorry. was it an agreement with the russians they would not deploy? you said they did not have an impact on the operations. we did no coordination, no agreements with the russians before the strikes. it s important to note that. i want to say, to the best of our ability, at this time, no syrian weapon had any effect on anything we did. tara? thank you. dana, for you, last year when the similar type attack occurred, there was an assessment it degraded chemical weapons and a couple months later the pentagon thought that specific airfield was back at it. what assurances do you have that you have defeated them to create chemical weapons and for general mckenzie, the b-1s were escorted by the fighter.
development facilities. that was the difference. we think, by doing this, this was very successful. we are confident that we ve significantly degraded his z ability to ever use chemical weapons again. what kind of response should the assad regime expect from the u.s. if they were to use chemical weapons again? one, it s important to remember we had, this represents three permanent members of the u.n. security council that did this. the uk and france, our oldest allies. this is about values. we did this because it s intolerable for any civilized nation to tolerate the use of chemical weapons. missy? thank you. i just have two, one follow up on michael s question for you, general and a question for you,
as for those chemical weapons, france says this morning, if president assad use s them agai, there will be more military air strikes. i m going to ask you to stick around with us. i m going to bring in hans nichols from the pentagon. i know we are expecting the press conference to get under way for a better assessment of what happens, what was struck, whether it was mission accomplished. help put this in perspective, you have been speaking to sources on the spectrum of potential targets. where does this fall in terms of, was this a large scale operation or a limited strike operation? that s the key question on what sort of rational went into the targeting. i think we are going to learn a lot here in the next couple minutes, mainly on the battle damage assessment, what they think they have accomplished. we have heard from the syrians, they are clear there was damage. another crucial aspect is the success rate of the u.s.
our weapon. no affect that we know at this time. finish your thought? other activity around other sites, movement of weapons or movement of chemicals? i don t have that information right now, i m sorry. okay, tom. you said we are very confident about the evidence we have. now, russia and syria denied any chemical weapons were used. i m just wondering why you wouldn t share your evidence with the world. they went to the u.n. in 1962 with evidence of the russian build up in cuba. why wouldn t you do something similar if there s doubts. there s no doubt for us. why not share the evidence, nen? a lot of this has to do with intelligence. i m very happy to show evidence, if i can. we were very confident about the decisions we made. i m going to take one more question from aaron. you have already spoken, come on.