THIS IS NOT PROGRESS – AT 9:31 A.M. ET:  Field Marshal Obama's non-strategy for defeating ISIS appears to be non-working.  What a surprise.   From USA Today: 

WASHINGTON — In a sign of its resilience, the Islamic State appears to have recruited new fighters to offset 15,000 militants killed in a U.S.-led airstrike campaign approaching its first anniversary, U.S. military and intelligence estimates show.

More than 5,500 airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria that began Aug. 8, 2014, have forced the extremist organization to disperse its fighters into smaller groups, making them less of a threat to seize large chunks of territory, according to the military estimates. Despite the lethal strikes, the group continues to attract new recruits and replace leaders, highlighting the difficulty of fighting a movement that draws support from Muslims around the world.

A year ago, the CIA said it believed the Islamic State had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria. The estimate remains the same this year, according to a U.S. intelligence official, who asked not to be named since he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

The U.S.-led coalition confirmed the 15,000 casualty number but would not discuss it publicly. The deaths are tracked as part of daily battle damage assessments and coalition efforts to avoid civilian casualties. Aerial surveillance is used to assess the impact of airstrikes, including enemy casualties.

One reason the military does not trumpet enemy death estimates is lingering embarrassment from the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon announced daily enemy death figures as a sign of military progress. Yet those counts proved to be exaggerated and U.S. troops ultimately withdrew from Vietnam, having failed to defeat the army of communist North Vietnam.

COMMENT:  That last paragraph is complete garbage.  We now know that the United States was actually doing quite well against the North Vietnamese.  How do we know?  Because they admitted it in their own official history, a written history largely ignored in the United States.  We withdrew because of political pressures at home, not because of battlefield failures.  Once we withdrew, the South Vietnamese army took over and acquitted itself very well.  We ultimately failed because a peace treaty was torn up by the enemy, and the United States, tired of the war and suffering from some very distorted reporting by major news organizations, cut off aid to the South Vietnamese.  President Gerald Ford called the aid cutoff an act of dishonor, and he was correct.

Compare please to South Korea, where we stayed the course, maintained a troop commitment even after the Korean War ended, and showed patience.  There's a free and vibrant South Korea.  There's no longer a South Vietnam.

August 4, 2015