Jungle warfare/insurgency really, really, really sucks.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493017)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493081)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493095)

I guess it's all subjective but I would MUCH rather fight on the German lowlands than in the deep jungles of SE Asia.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493120)

That would be the BEST imaginable victory and what kind of victory is that?

It was ill thought out and everyone beginning with JFK knew it was a major fuck up, but no one knew how to stop the momentum

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493075)

Had the US pushed to expand the war in Vietnam, there is no telling how much damage the 5th column could have achieved. In that regard, although Vietnam was a loss, the bigger victory was not allowing a festering revolution in the US to gain more power.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493362)

A lot of people believed that there was going to be an actual revolution in the 1960's.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493329)

It is as good as example of the failure of "peacekeeping missions" as can be found.

However, our military, for all the problems, wiped the VC and NVA at every occasion. Our losses were minimal compared to enemy losses. While there were some issues with conscripted troops, our army performed amazingly and gave junior officers combat experience that would assist them in being effective senior leaders.

It cannot be understated how badly the war was managed by the 1960's libs who ran the US. Agent Orange, the country wide electric fence, strict rules on limiting engagement, all of which were the features of the Kennedy & Johnson administration, were utter SPS. Hamlet resettlement were stupid beyond stupid and a product of Kennedy's Ivy educated "whiz kids," which if you study this stuff, you have to really question the value of a modern Ivy League education (especially considering this is the same generation of thinkers that came up with "planned obsolescence." The result was not in question by the time Nixon was elected.

The war was unpopular and leftists (with USSR help) almost caused a revolution using this war as a catalyst.

Generally, anything that libs say about the war is 100% bullshit. Basically, it was successful on military terms but an utter disaster politically. The political harm done during this time still exists today, and it's not a stretch to say that today's SJW revolutionaries were created solely by the political upheaval that popular opposition to the Vietnam war allowed (not caused, but allowed).

The ultimate fuck you was the amnesty order from Carter.

In short, the Vietnam was was but one of the many ills that 60's lib boomers inflicted upon the nation.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493133)

It has to mean you take the enemy's territory away from them or cause them to lay down their arms. Dont you agree?

Neither happened, all politics aside. You might say those didnt happen BC politics, but that just means you cant separate the two.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493186)

The north only won in1975 when the conventional northern army launched a massive ground invasion and the south had no US air back up or materials supplies because the House Dems refused to authorize it in the aftermath of Watergate

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493255)

"Though still too weak to launch another full-scale offensive, Hanoi was now aware that it could do so without the threat of American bombing. Smaller Viet Cong operations and sabotage continued; these opened divisions and lowered morale in the ARVN. Through 1974 the North prepared itself for a final invasion of South Vietnam. In American domestic politics, Richard Nixon departed the White House, resigning in August 1974 as a result of the long-running Watergate scandal. Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford went to Congress seeking $1.45 billion in aid for South Vietnam but was given only $700 million. In December Hanoi tested the new president’s mettle by launching an attack in Phuoc Long province, a clear violation of the Paris treaty. Ford protested but took no military action. The path was now clear for North Vietnam to invade the South."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36494032)

Let me help you criticize my post. (Lord Cornwallis)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493261)

A combination of terrain being fucking horrible to engage in long term combat plus the peoples martial spirit being as such made it a fools errand.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493212)

but our goal was so weird, in retrospect, it's obvious why we could not win.

We wanted them to want to be more like us.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493226)

and actually ho chi minh was a pretty moderate socialist type until he got a hold of lenin's anti imperialist ideas. but even then, he was much more willing to compromise than the actual leaders of the north..

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493236)

Have you read the Mitrokhin Archives? It’ll blow your mind some of the shit the KGB got up to in furtherance of that goal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493408)

Also, they may not have lost the cold war, being that the revolutionary seeds planted in the 1950's and 1960's seems to be as strong as ever today.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493434)

and lol if you're implying that china will outlast the US

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493485)

China has challenges too but I can imagine where they'll be in 2-3 generations without total collapse.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493511)

The Soviets’ last revenge

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493483)

Now, I will say that in addition to corrupt opportunists, Gorby was a naive fool that wanted the USSR to become Sweden rather than understanding that socialism was just not a functional system.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493567)

And they succeeded!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36494016)

the real problem is that the north had the political will (due to commie brainwashing) that gave them the motivation to persevere

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493228)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493289)

Today, there are so many people who want to join the US military - even though they are almost guaranteed to see a warzone - that standards to get into the military are absurdly high. This is in large part to the relatively high pay.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493499)

for comparison, i believe i read that 400 Yale grads died in WWII..unthinkable with the "upper class" that we have now

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493542)

The liberal upper class's aversion to military service is a whole other issue and, if Vietnam showed everything, the draft made worse the problem of various socioeconomic groups not participating equally. If anything, military service was greatly devalued because of the draft and the fact that anyone with adequate means could avoid the draft, as opposed to the lower classes which could not avoid it. EDIT: this is a feature of every conscription effort, ever.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493571)

There is no way to central planning engineer real shared sacrifice in a war. There are segments of the population that are going to go, and there are segments of the population that are not going to go.

The cultural shift of upper class libs against the military and people who serve in the military is one of the nastiest parts of shitlib culture. Why this occurred, and is still alive and thriving, is not 100% understood and there has been a lot written about it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493640)

"The Army is lowering recruitment standards to levels not seen in at least two decades, and the implications are severe—not only for the future of the Army, but also for the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

Fred Kaplan

FRED KAPLAN

Fred Kaplan is the author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.

The latest statistics—compiled by the Defense Department. and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based National Priorities Project—are grim. They show that the percentage of new Army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. (The Pentagon's longstanding goal is 90 percent.)

The percentage of what the Army calls "high-quality" recruits—those who have high-school diplomas and who score in the upper 50th percentile on the Armed Forces' aptitude tests—has declined from 56.2 percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more than 2 percent of all recruits could be "Category IV"—defined as applicants who score in the 10th to 30th percentile on the aptitude tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In 2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4 percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493658)

No one is going to universally agree on a war unless the US is directly invaded if that means a draft. Full stop.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493723)

If we hadn’t half-assed it we could have nuked Hanoi or bombed the red river gorge damn and been done with it in a week.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493412)

OR

WWII was different. The largest and most destructive war in history had different rules.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493519)

If I had to change the war to a winning strategy, here's what I would have done:

1. No draft.

2. The US deploys a small army that primarily protects massive air power that pummels the VC and NVA until they submit (or until they cease to exist as a people).

The end.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493541)

And by the end of the war the VC was largely destroyed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493841)

ARVN is still decimated and the south govt is even weaker than before. conclusion: the south falls, just a little bit later

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493898)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493976)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493999)

Hardened NVA vets now make a living catering to US boomer vets on vacation.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493681)

On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, by Harry G. Summers Jr.

Colonel Harry Summers begins this concise and fascinating study of American strategy in Vietnam by disposing of two myths. Summers…

ELIOT A. COHEN / JULY 1, 1982

A

Military Thinking

On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War.

by Harry G. Summers, Jr.

Presidio Press. 137 pp. $12.95.

Colonel Harry Summers begins this concise and fascinating study of American strategy in Vietnam by disposing of two myths. The first, prevalent among many civilians (and fed by misleading books like Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage’s Crisis in Command), is that American troops were defeated in Vietnam. The second, prevalent among many officers, is that we lost the war simply because of a failure of will on the part of civilian politicians. Summers explains that we never lost a battle but that we did indeed lose the war. He has the courage to say that the armed forces failed in their first duty: “As military professionals, it was our job to judge the true nature of the Vietnam war, communicate those facts to our civilian decision-makers, and to recommend appropriate strategies.”

Although this is a short book, it is one which raises a host of important questions about the course of the Vietnam war, the nature of American civil-military relations, and the essence of strategy itself. Summers makes painstaking use of classical strategic throught to explicate our failure in Vietnam. He quotes extensively but shrewdly from Clausewitz’s On War, and devotes a large section of the book to an analysis of the Vietnam conflict in terms of the “principles of war” (the objective, the offensive, mass, economy of force, maneuver, unity of command, surprise, security, and simplicity). His deft treatment shows how these seeming platitudes take on meaning in the context of military history.

Summers’s arguments are provocative: he claims that from the beginning the United States government generally, and its military advisers in particular, completely misunderstood the nature of the Vietnam war. By concentrating on the counter-guerrilla campaign in the South we neglected the real threat, a North Vietnamese conventional invasion, to which, in the end, our allies succumbed. According to Summers, we misdirected our efforts because our military leaders allowed the foremost question—what are we trying to do?—to slip away from them. Without a firm grasp on the objective, our efforts were doomed to failure.

Colonel Summers would seem to prefer, in retrospect, a strategy of battlefield isolation. The United States Army (aided by the South Koreans and perhaps crack South Vietnamese units) should have isolated South Vietnam from its northern enemy by occupying a line extending from the sea to the Thai border. Behind that line the South Vietnamese could have quashed the Vietcong insurgency and, with our aid, created an effective conventional force to cope with the North Vietnamese. Our strategy thus would have been one of active defense, i.e., a strategy aimed at denying the enemy access to the battlefield. Instead we chose a strategically passive defense, which involved reacting to enemy infiltration with a multitude of search-and-destroy missions. This tactical offensive did indeed kill hundreds of thousands of enemy troops, but it left the initiative with the North, as the offensives of 1968 and 1972 demonstrated.

Summers argues that American leaders misread the lesson of the Korean war. We interpreted the outcome of the conflict as a warning against becoming involved in unwinnable Asian land wars. In fact, he points out, our Korean strategy was a success, because the United States obtained its objective of creating a defensible Republic of Korea. Unlike our policy in South Vietnam, in Korea we fended off North Korean and Chinese regulars while our South Korean clients wiped out Communist guerrillas and gradually, under our aegis, created an effective conventional force.

Summers’s argument here is intriguing but open to question, for it is conceivable that Korea and Vietnam differ from one another less in degree (as he suggests) than in kind. It is, of course, impossible to know how the North Vietnamese would have reacted to the creation of a strategic barrier extending some two hundred miles inland, or how such a barrier would have operated, but the history of such cordon defenses is not encouraging. What is clear, in any event, is that the strategy and tactics we adopted did not prevent South Vietnam from falling to the Communists.

_____________

Underlying Summers’s account is a deep unease over the rupture between the Army and American society during the Vietnam period. In the years following 1940, the American Army, and above all its professional officer corps, had grown accustomed to a substantial amount of respect and even deference. The hostility directed at the armed forces by civilians during the Vietnam period aroused a horror which pervades Summers’s book, and which remains today an undercurrent in conversations I have had with colonels who were junior officers (lieutenants and captains) in Vietnam.

Summers insists, as do most of his contemporaries and colleagues, that our biggest mistake was the attempt to fight Vietnam in cold blood, without a declaration of war. Unable to depend upon the psychological mobilization that would have accompanied such a declaration, the Army, composed of citizen-soldiers though it may have been, acquired the reputation of a monster, stupidly and squalidly consuming eighteen-year-old lives. A declaration of war, Summers believes, would have brought Army and society into harmony. Although it would also have meant a commitment to victory, victory would have been defined as the achievement of a specific, limited political objective—the creation of an independent South Vietnam—not the unconditional surrender of the North Vietnamese.

_____________

It is an appealing argument, but, again, open to debate. The United States, because of its role as guarantor of order in large parts of the world, must, like Great Britain before it, be ready to fight a multitude of small, dirty wars. Such wars must be fought in cold blood, for to conjure up the energies of an embattled nation is to risk either disproportionate public attention to minor problems or the inevitable feelings of disgust that are aroused in a democracy when it confronts the grim necessities of chronic warfare. The Johnson administration did not mobilize large numbers of reservists in 1967-68 because it feared that such a move would provoke calls for an invasion of North Vietnam and a dangerous widening of the war (including perhaps Chinese intervention). On the other hand, a frequent resort to declarations of war, accompanied by conscription and reserve mobilizations, might provoke a refusal to take on such ugly but necessary campaigns as that waged in Korea.

One solution to this dilemma might be the exclusive use of our elite, professional Marine Corps to fight small, undeclared wars. The Marines have long been composed mainly of volunteer career soldiers, and are accustomed to fighting nasty conflicts without the benefit of popular support. The strictness of their discipline and the monkish peculiarities of their traditions at once isolate them from American society and prevent them from depending (as the Army does) on constant approbation. The Army has fought every major war with masses of citizen soldiers; the Marines have preferred, insofar as is possible, to take only volunteers—“a few good men” as the advertisement has it.

There are difficulties with this solution, however. The Marines are few in number, and the other services are unlikely to view with equanimity an expansion of their size. They must devote much of their attention and resources to the peculiar requirements of amphibious warfare; they do not have organic logistical and administrative support; they are scattered around the globe. Perhaps most important, it is in the nature of things that the Army will not allow others to fight a sizable American war, if for no other reason than pride.

One of the many merits of Summers’s book is that it brings questions like these to the forefront of our attention. It is indeed the proper role of military men to educate civilians, be they politicians or average citizens, in the nature of war. Of late, civilian policy analysts, journalists, academics, and mere onlookers have usurped this role—indeed, one source of our failure in Vietnam was the government’s fascination with unrealistic academic theories of military strategy (as Stephen Rosen argues in a forthcoming article in International Security). There is a place, in fact a great need, for informed civilian discussion of military policy, but strategy and tactics are and should be the business of professional soldiers. Colonel Summers’s book indicates that the armed forces are perfectly capable of producing lucid and literate strategists. One may disagree with his conclusions, but one hopes that there are more like him.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493725)

There wasn't much social cohesion in Vietnam outside the cities and little sense of national identity. You wouldn't have found a paved road or a flushing toilet outside Hanoi or Saigon and the mass of common folks probably never wandered too far from where they were born or had anything to do with anyone outside their immediate clan. Most people lived in rural areas and might be related to the folks in the next village over, might know who the people were in the village after that, but the village beyond that they wouldn't even speak the same dialect.

The only national identity in Vietnam (or Cambodia, or Laos, and to a lesser extent Thailand) was based around resistance to foreign interference and invasion of the region. The former 'nobility' in these countries were basically just a bunch of puppets set up to create a false sense of nationhood with the flawed reasoning that creating some semblance of national cohesion would make the people that much easier to subjugate. The number of educated people in the region were minuscule and there was almost nothing to speak of industry wise outside some subsistence agriculture. The Chinese came in and pushed the Vietnamese around for a few hundred years. But what what they did have in common was that they got tired of it and fought back. The French and then the Japanese, and then the French again, came in guns a-blazing and told them all how it was going to be and they got pissed and fought back. They saw the Americans as just the next group of chumps in a long line of foreign occupiers meddling in their affairs and trying to take away what limited resources they had. The Soviets and the Chinese were willing to give them weapons and training for what was largely a nationalist resistance movement and retards like McNamara or Westmoreland failed to recognize this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4034400&forum_id=2#36493904)