Morale in the military has been sinking at an alarming rate, thanks to restrictions placed on the men and women serving the nation overseas, retired Navy SEAL Carl Higbie tells
Newsmax TV.
Higbie said the well-being of the military has been "put second to things like the morale of the countries that we were invading, which should never be the case."
"Our rules of engagement are so restrictive that it rips our own lives for the sake of political correctness, and that's where it started and it just progressed from there," he said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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"Especially under [President Barack] Obama, somebody who's never served, someone who doesn't have any respect for the military and is willing to use this as a political pawn for his administration."
But Higbie — author of
"Battle on the Homefront: A Navy SEAL's Mission to Save the American Dream," published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform — said things can be fixed.
"Absolutely ... There's a growing divide between the leadership and the sled dogs, as I call them, the people who go out there and kick in the actual doors," he said.
"Now, if we get a good commander in chief that's willing to listen to the people who are actually fighting the war and on their terms and our terms as Americans, absolutely it can turn around.
"But right now you have Obama relieving all the people who have combat experience, people who have seen what it's like to be at war, and he's leaving in place the yes men, the generals that'll just do exactly as they're told regardless of their oath to constitutionality."
Higbie said that is what is "crushing" the military's spirit.
"But if you have a commander in chief that's willing to go against that and reinstill the faith in the U.S. military, absolutely," he said.
"You've heard Obama stand up there and say, we have ISIL [the Islamic State] on the run, and the fact is we don't."
Higbie said that when he was deployed to Ramadi in 2009, it was a "pretty hostile area but it was very defensible."
"The infrastructure that we put there as American troops was almost foolproof, and the only way that that could have fallen is if a clear breakdown in communication and leadership from the Iraqi army and the Iraqi forces and also a lack of support from America," he said.
"Now, [President George W.] Bush said if we pulled out prematurely, Iraq would subsequently fall, which it has, and it's continuing to fall.
"So, any dictation from the media or from the White House that says that we're winning the war on ISIL or ISIS is false."
Higbie added that Iran remains "a global force for evil."
"When I was in Iraq, we fought against Iranian influence. There's Iranian influence as far as Afghanistan. You see it in Syria, you see it up to Turkey, you see it now in Yemen, where our Marines had to leave suddenly and leave their weapons behind," he said.
"This is a systemic problem, and the fact of the matter is our president, our commander in chief, is not doing anything about it. He's also allowing this nuclear arms treaty to go through with Iran that has nothing for us.
"It doesn't allow inspections, it doesn't allow anything that would provide any good will for us. It's just simply a check in the box."
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