Alcaraz says if his lab receives samples, his team has up to 15 days to analyze it. It may take several weeks for a final report from the inspection team, Coyle says. But as he notes, the United States may not wait for the U.N. investigators’ report to launch a strike.

“Mostly it’s just that we don’t get the result we hoped for,” Coyle told Fox. “The leader of the country, bad guy though that leader may be, doesn’t give up, and so it leads to wider war. It leads to many innocent civilians being hurt or killed and doesn’t produce the result we hoped for in the first place.”

Nonetheless, the “fact that so many of the wounded and dead have no apparent shrapnel or other types of wounds that might come from rifle or artillery attacks is also suggestive” of chemical weapons, Coyle, now a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Washington research group, said in an interview.

Absent an unexpected development, always a real possibility in volatile Syria, there is no expectation and seemingly little U.S. desire for immediate action against Syrian chemical weapons. “It’s fine for the 82nd Airborne to practice these things, but I just don’t see the scenario yet,” former Defense Department official Philip Coyle said.