WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- The U.S. armed forces still have the "enormous power and capacity" to defeat all other foes, America's top military officer said.
Although U.S. forces remain committed in Iraq for the foreseeable future, they retain an enormous reserve capacity that could defeat any other potential enemy, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs told a news conference at the Pentagon Thursday according to a report Friday in the Army Times.
Pace admitted that the concentration of U.S. military forces in Iraq meant that victory in any other war that had to be fought at the same time would take longer because of the unavoidable delays in deploying the necessary armed forces to win it. But he insisted that the overwhelming scale of U.S. military resources meant that eventual success was still assured.
"There's zero doubt about the outcome," Pace said according to the Army Times report. "It would simply take us longer than we would like."
The U.S. armed forces still retained an "enormous residual capacity" of about 2 million non-deployed active and reserve troops, Pace said, according to the report. "We have the vast power of our ... Navy and our Air Force still available to take on any potential foes."
However, U.S. air operations in other wars might cause significantly greater casualties because they would be forced to rely on traditional, non-precision, or "dumb," munitions rather than the high-precision, "smart" missiles and bombs whose inventory has run down because they were committed to Iraq operations, the general said.
"You would potentially increase the number of casualties on both sides and the amount of damage done on both sides," he said "... You may end up using more 'dumb' bombs, for example, to get the job done."
