There won't be any strikes.
Quoting an US Army sergeant from militaryphotos.net "we fight only incompetent, preferbly unarmed enemies from safe distance", I doubt any strikes at all, unless they're idiots, or they possess some key information we don't (what could it possibly be though?). What aims the US might want to accomplish there?
- destroy enemy's military infrastructure;
- provide air support for the rebels.
None of which could be accomplished without public bloodletting, especially looking at how rushed this operation might be. They've got away in similar situation in Grenada, after all achieveing their goals, here I doubt they would be able to cover it up (too many forces that'd like to capitalize on that), nor will be able to achieve said goals. Even if they go bonkers, striking Syria, they won't be able to change anything in the battlefield on land, these will be strikes for the show only with questionable efficency, because Syria has all the equipement and experience to put up a good fight.
If we do believe open sources Syria got SAMs, new deliveries:
- Tunguska x 6, delivered by 2008
- Buk-M2E x 18, delivered by 2008
- Pantsir-S1 x 36 delivered by 2008, additional 6 systems by the end of 2013
- Strelets of unknown quantity, delivered by 2006 (this is basically a MTLB chasis with 6 Igla MANPADS mounted on it)
- S-125 Pechora-2M x 8, delivered by 2012
- Tor-M1, unknown quantity, unknown status
- S-300, unknown quantiry, to be delivered by 2014
Older stock:
- Igla MANPADS of unknown quantity, approx. over thousand
- S-125 Neva of unknown quantity, approx. over hundred (few dozens of them were supposed to go through modernisation to upgrade them to S-125 Pechora-2M, status unknown), thoug I doubt all of them are operational
- S200VE of unknown quantity, approx. few dozens
- Multiple older SAMs
Syria got ASMs, only new deliveries:
- Bastion-P x 2 or 4 , 36 missiles per system
Won't bother to quote all of the article, this is the only info that relevant to the discsussion if we're talking about deterrents from air or sea strikes. At the moment Syria along with Algeria got the most massive air-defence in the region simply judging by the number of operational systems with sizeable part of them being new, i.e. capable working in the situation of constant EW countermeasures modern warfare is known for. Taking into account Lebanon war of 1982 I'm hoping they've got appropriate experience as well in that area, since majority of IAF losses were from SAMs.
Given current forces of 1st rank ships US Navy has got in the region, available Pantsirs alone could chew out every single Tomahawk they've got to offer -- it's relatively easy, subsonic target (there're multiple known precedents when Tomahawks were downed by portable systems not designed for the task) and more importantly there's simply not enough of them to create sufficient volume of fire. CBGs are a problem however (CVN 68, 75 -- see map posted above), but the presence of Bastions won't let them into 300 km sea zone of Syria unless in suicide run, significantly hindering their attack capabilities. Rest assured any intellegence info from Russian fleet lurking around, like target designation for missiles (i.e. mirroring situation of South Ossetia war of 2008) will be handed over to Syrian army.
I'm following almost all US Army operations for the past 10 years and the never raised any doubt in me, that they do not know their limits of competence (hence no on-land operation in Yugoslavia). Of course, there're always a moment when every empire is getting over-confident and cocky, and it's really close to that moment, but I don't think this is it. What I see is (figuratively speaking) a man, who is saying "I'm gonna punch, gonna punch, just you wait, I'm gonna punch..." -- and nothing. Why do they need this is another story.
