5 Thoughts on Donald's Tomahawk Strike Against Syria

1. Costs: You're going to read a lot of bullshit about the costs, from as low as $250K per missile. Don't believe them. If the Navy gives a figure south of $1M per missile, don't believe them either. The number is much more than that. Here's the Department of Defense's own acquisition requests (most recent request, 2017) through the past few years, and their cost per unit:
   FY 2013: $293.6M / 196 units = $1.5M / missile
   FY 2014: $312.5M / 196 units = $1.6M / missile
   FY 2015: $317.5M / 243 units = $1.3M / missile
   FY 2016: $202.3M / 149 units = $1.36M / missile
   FY 2017: $186.9M / 100 units = $1.87M / missile (requested)
2. Hypocrisy: It's inescapable, that Donald is the biggest hypocrite in the world. Back when President Obama drew a red line in the sand, Donald said that we should stay out of Syria and that Obama needed to get congressional approval for air strikes against Syria -- a declaration of war, essentially. Jump forward 4 years and Donald is getting into Syria and without congressional approval. Why the hypocrisy? Because of two things: Armchair quarterbacking and an incoherent policy -- the next two items on this list.
3. Armchair Quarterbacking: This is one-half of why Donald's hypocrisy has been exposed. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback when you don't have the responsibilities of the Oval Office. It's an entirely different situation when you're in the Oval Office and you're actually presented threat response options and you have to take responsibility for your actions. We all sit at home and armchair quarterback, but Donald's actions are made substantially worse by his disinterest in the details and their nuances -- he can't see past the first play.
4. Incoherency Driven by Emotional Knee-Jerk: For the moment, put aside whether or not you support a military response to the sarin gas attack by Syria on its own people. The biggest problem here is that Donald's response showed an incoherent foreign policy that was driven by an emotional knee-jerk response to seeing dead and suffering children from the sarin gas attack, fueled by his ego of having the most powerful weapons at his disposal. Today, it's not that big of a problem. Tomorrow, it will destroy America's name and prestige around the world as that chaos is further unleashed through ill-considered decisions and a low-threshold trigger finger.
5. I Would Have Supported Air Strikes, But...: Think about how stupid his actions were. They did not "degrade" Syria's ability to deliver chemical weapons attacks one bit. Airstrips can easily be repaired and planes replaced within a matter of a week. He didn't have an actual plan in place to go after the chemical weapons, either. The attack wasn't overwhelming, either, with the target just a single air base. So now, all he's done is poked the hornet's nest without thinking through how the hornets will react. He asked the military to come up with a set of quick-strike options and that's all he got. His level of cognition is pathetically low and a danger to America. It's okay to be this dumb if you're in charge of a business, but not when you're the Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the most powerful military in the world.