Joke, maybe it is. Since you are in are were part of the military you may think I am talking down to you but that is not the case I am only bringing everyone else up to speed so bare with me while I give you the long answer.

The US military is a force on force fighting group. Meaning it is designed to fight armies of other nations defeating them handily. As far back as the revolutionary war we have proof that a force on force military is not designed or equipped to fight a gorilla war. Of the million plus members of the US armed forces only 20% are force on force, or war fighters. The rest are support staff. Of that 20% the US army has one unit trained for counter insurgency which numbers in the thousands, the Air Force has none, the Navy has a few dozen under the name SeAL’s Sea Air Land commandos. Formerly known as UDT, and the Marine Corps has a few hundred under the name of FAST the Fleet Anti-terror Security Team. We are talking about fewer than two thousand people trained and equipped to fight counter insurgency out of over a million people in uniform.
The terrorist are using gorilla warfare tactics which is hit and run, expose as few of your people to get a maximum number of enemy dead or injured then run and hide till you can attack again. They are not very good at this but good enough to tie us up in knots trying to find them. The only way to beat this is to find them before they can strike and run away hit them hard fast and continuously until they are all dead then start on the next cell and repeat the process.
This works because under normal situations terrorist have limited recourses and run out of fighters quickly (after about five years). In this case there are nation states that are supporting them and to show how effective we have been the enemy has had to sent in their own uniformed troops in to support the dwindling number of terrorist. Three Iranian General Officers have been captured alive in Iraq; Iranian troops have been captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with massive help from three nations they are losing because we understand how to fight that type of war and even though we can’t use all the tools we have that work because of the squishy politicians we are still winning.

The basic rule of gorilla or terror wars is if it takes more than five years to win, you lost. The war on terror has been joined for six years which means we just keep killing them and they have fewer trained and motivated leaders, the recruits are less motivated because they can’t see an end in sight and even the suicide murderers see that their death won’t mean much. We are at the tipping point that shows they can’t win all they can do is make noise, kill some of our troops and hope for our politicians to end it for them like King George did in the revolutionary war, or like the Vietnamese did, in that war. Wars are expensive in dollars and people and if they can get us to worry about the cost more than the win then they have a chance even after they have lost to get out looking like the victors. This has nothing to do with drawing it out for profit. The President stated in his address to the nation that the war would out live his presidency because he understood what we are fighting even though most of the country does not. This is not Vietnam, or WWII it is a war on terror that is being fought in fifty countries of which you folks only get to see two of the countries we are fighting in. Trust me if we were having any minor troubles in the other countries it would be all over the news but since it is working and we are winning the focus is on Iran and Afghanistan but mostly in Iraq because it is easy to portray loss even though we have not lost or are we close to losing.