Pontius:
I think SASless is singing the same tune McCain sang in the early 1990's in re Bosnia. We had a lot of arguments in the US before we finally put our feet down in 1995, under a NATO flag. IIRC he made the same argument in re Kosovo in 1999, but the infamous "we won it all with airpower" operation went off anyway.
The Japanese follow up to Midway was to have been with troops/boots on the ground, which got queered when their fleet suffered a massive defeat. The Pearl Harbor raid, as predicted by Yamamoto, provided a brief advantage for Japan, but Pearl remained the hub of the US fleet in the Pacific. Had boots on the ground been a follow up, US fleet hub moving east might have had a serious negative impact on operations, particularly the submarine force's ops and offensives (all crappy torpedoes considered).
As to Syria, as was shown during the Clinton era vis a vis Saddam, and even the Tomahawk launch on Al Q's ops in Afghanistan, 1998, lobbing Tomahawks doesn't tend to solve your problem. It just makes a bunch of stuff blow up. While that by itself isn't a bad thing, it doesn't do what putting bayonets and boots on the objective does.
The Marines and the Army tend to agree on the old adage:
"You can bomb and strafe all day, but until you put boots on the objective, it isn't yours."
EDIT:
The major exception to that is use of nukes, at which point if you nuke the objective, you don't want it, or at least you don't want to occupy it any time soon.
EDIT 2:
Easy Street, loved the linked article. Well put.
