Admiral Vladimir Valuyev told Sputnik News: “Judging by the fact that it took them [the US, Britain and France] more than an hour to conduct a joint missile strike, we can assume that the three had failed to take coordinated action.”
He said a successful attack means that missiles fly up to the targets simultaneously, which did not happen during the attack.
“It added to the fact that the outdated Soviet-made air defense systems, which are currently in service with the Syrian Army, downed more than 70 of the 110 modern high-precision missiles,” Valuyev said.
According to him, if this missile attack had been staged in a zone the Russian Armed Forces had oversight over, the intercepting of incoming missiles would be close to 100 percent.
He said the US and its allies attacked only secondary targets, “which were groundlessly and randomly picked by the US military and political leadership as objects for the production and storage of chemical weapons”.
Valuyev suggested that judging by the number of US, UK and French warships and aircraft deployed near Syria, they planned to use about 300 units of ammunition in a joint strike.
“They have used [just] a third of the total number of the missiles,” he concluded.
Pundit Jim Stone believes however that the attack was supposed to last much longer, but stopped suddenly when Russian fighter aircraft became airborne.
“I am going to stick with my assessment that something big was going to happen that caused the US to stop the attack,” says Stone.
“All the cruise missiles could report their status to the launch site, and the US was sitting there watching them vanish before they reached their targets.” The missiles reporting their status is already old and outdated technology, he argues.
“So it would have been ominous to watch them [the missiles] vanish, And then suddenly, Russian planes were in the air, preparing to attack.
“That did happen, regardless of whatever any claims are. And within 20 minutes, before they reached their targets, it was suddenly announced that the attack which was supposed to last for days was suddenly over, after only about an hour.
“Something big happened, and no one is saying what. My guess is that Russia made the right threat.”
