WHY WE'RE LOSING – AT 8:25 A.M. ET:  There are reasons why nations lose battles and wars.  On this Memorial Day weekend, we might contemplate how many troops we have lost with confused or losing strategies.  From the Washington Times: 

Special operations forces are aggravated over being largely held back from the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

Top U.S. special operations commanders say they are building forces for a multi-generational fight — not a war that will be won in the next few years.

“We recognize this is a longterm prospect,” Gen. Joseph Votel, the leader of U.S. Special Operations Command told The Daily Beast during a special operations forum in Tampa, Florida. “We’re patient.”

Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, who heads the Air Force Special Operations Command estimated that the fight could be “a 15-year struggle,” the Daily Beast reported Friday.

Special operations officers and troops in Tampa and Washington expressed their frustration over having to fight remotely in Iraq and Syria; advising Iraqis, Kurdish Peshmerga, and rebel Syrian fighters from afar instead of joining in the battle.

“We are doing everything through cellphones … It’s hard to do much when you can’t go outside the wire,” one special operator said, The Daily Beast reported.

And...

“You can’t say ‘We’re with you every step of the way, except when you are going on combat operations,‘“a former senior special operations official told The Daily Beast.

Many of the officers at the Tampa conference said that both Mosul and Ramadi, the two cities taken over by the terrorist group, could have withstood the sieges if U.S. military advisers had been working with Iraqi forces on the ground.

COMMENT:  We appear to be losing almost everywhere in the world.  In the Mideast, certainly.  In Ukraine, definitely.  In our confrontation with the new Russia, of course.  And in facing the Chinese military buildup in the Pacific, jury out, but "win" doesn't seem to be a word in the Obaman vocabulary.

We are cutting our forces when our enemies are building theirs.  The president seems at best indifferent to the plight of allies or potential allies.  Military defense seems a distraction to him and to the left wing of the Democratic Party that supports him.

The general who spoke of a 15-year struggle is probably being optimistic.  It took us 40 years to win the Cold War.  Our children, and their children, may well pay the price for the policies the United States is pursuing today.

May 24,  2015