The April 6 missile strike on the Shayrat Airbase in Homs, Syria, has provoked a week of debate on everything from its legality to its political significance. The only thing about which everyone agrees is that as a tactical matter, it did very little. The 59 Tomahawk missiles were dropped on the largely empty airbase. The runway was apparently left unscathed, a fact Assad made symbolic use of the following day by launching his air force from Shayrat to continue the attacks on his own country. And that was befitting the strike, whose value was also apparently meant to be symbolic. But what message did it send? And was it effective?
That a military action might be nothing more than symbolic by no means suggests that it is illegitimate or useless. Tomorrow, April 18, is the 75th anniversary of perhaps the most effective and yet merely symbolic military action in U.S. history. On April 18, 1942, Colonel James Doolittle led a squadron of 16 medium-range Army bombers off an aircraft carrier in the Pacific for the first bombing run over Japan during the Second World War.
