The US military is still in a position to defend the nation despite the country being caught up in the midst of the novel coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19 pandemic, according to a former senior Marine Corps officer.

In the United States, there have been 105,778 confirmed cases and 1,731 deaths, according to the most recent figures.

Despite the United States now being the epicenter of the worldwide pandemic, the nation’s armed forces remain capable meeting the long-standing expectation that the military be able to fight a war on two fronts, said Lt. Col. (ret.) Dakota Wood, today a defense analyst with the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

“Oh, absolutely. I mean the force has fairly low numbers of people who have been infected by that. The posture is the same today as it was a month or two months or six months ago,” Wood said in an interview on Fox News.

“We haven’t degraded, in any way, the fighting capacity or readiness of the force. They want to prevent that from happening. So this is an extreme preventive measure to make sure that the military can continue to do what we expect it to do,” Wood added, commenting on an order from Defense Secretary Mark Esper freezing all U.S. troop movement overseas.

The freeze expected to affect some 90,000 troops including those scheduled to return home and those scheduled to deploy.

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