Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged yesterday that four years after invading Iraq, huge amounts of weapons depots remain available to insurgents.
“In terms of the unexploded munitions, it’s just a huge, huge problem,” Gates told a news conference at the Pentagon.
Seizing and destroying all of Saddam Hussein’s numerous
arsenals is a key objective because both Sunni and Shiite insurgents use unspent shells to make improvised explosive devices. The enemy places them along roads and attaches them to vehicles or suicide bombers to inflict most of the civilian and military casualties in Iraq.
“Fundamentally, the entire country was one big ammo dump,” Gates said. “And there were thousands of these sites. And so, you know, we’re doing our best to try and find them, but given the expanse of the countryand all the other tasks which the military is trying to carry out there, it’s a huge task.”
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace has told Congress the coalition has destroyed more than 200,000 tons of Iraq ammo.
As for the current five-week-old offensive to secure greater Baghdad, Gates said his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, may request more troops above a planned reinforcement of nearly 30,000 as the operation unfolds this spring and summer.
“But in terms of a significant additional number of combat troops, I don’t see that in the cards,” he said.
He put in a pitch for passage of a pending $122 billion emergency funding bill to bankroll the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Without the bill’s enactment by May, the Army will have to start scaling back training and basic services to soldiers and families.
“This kind of disruption to key programs will have a genuinely adverse effect on the readiness of the Army,” he said.
