Dempsey Pegs Syria No-Fly Zone at $1 Billion a Month
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Imposing a no-fly zone over Syria would cost as much as $1 billion a month and put U.S. aircraft at risk of being shot down without necessarily toppling Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the U.S. military’s top officer said.
Thousands of U.S. troops would be required on the ground if the U.S. wanted to establish buffer zones to protect targeted geographic areas or to control the proliferation of chemical weapons, Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee that was released yesterday.