I’m not sure why Cecil dismisses the 900 billion out of hand. Inflation costs may be difficult to untangle, because who knows what would have happened to the economy without a war, but the costs of later medical care for veterans, and their pensions, ought to be pretty simple to assess. There may be other examples as well, though he doesn’t enumerate all the factors that went into the 900 billion calculation. Perhaps lost productivity from having hundreds of thousands of young men fighting instead of manufacturing?
I know, newspaper column, not enough words, etc. But the column is more interesting the bigger the number, no?
Seriously? OK, money spent on military hardware does not ‘go up in smoke’. It is used to pay contractors and solider salaries etc etc. The money, in short, is mostly funneled back into the economy of America.
Now instead of paying for the war effort we, instead, gave the money straight away to another country.
What do you think that impact would be on Americas economy?
I’m prety sure the $140 billion Cecil was using there was in unadjusted dollars. As was the $900 billion dollars, which would be several trillion in today’s dollars.
The War in Vietnam was tragically futile, and says bad things about human nature. Each side would have been better off not to have fought. The First World War was like that too. The reasons for fighting were vague. The winners were worse off after the war than before.
During human evolution men who were victorious in war had more children who survived and reproduced than men who avoided war, so a tendency to fight wars is instinctive for men.
For women there was no advantage in fighting. If their side lost their husbands and male relatives were killed, and they were carried off. If their side won they had to share their husbands with captive women. Consequently, as women achieve more political power countries become more peaceful.
Uh, that’s not a universally accepted notion. Our ancestors were rapists and murderers too, but we’ve constructed a society where rapists and murderers are maligned.
As, opposed, to say looking at the economy during and after WW2?
Most economists felt that the Great Depression ended with the advent of World War II. Military spending on the war caused or at a very minimum accelerated recovery from the Great Depression.
Cynically, it also removed a large number of people from potential unemployment by thinning the workforce.
I am not advocating war as a method of economic recovery but it helps…
Back to (semi) OT, I don’t believe the American government could have managed to pay out directly that sum of money in any event. The government gets its funds through taxes…if people are not getting paychecks (by building war material or otherwise) then the cash flow is choked off.
Pesse (so north Vietnam would have still won without fighting) Mist
How about if we gave them American-made goods - like refrigerators and washers/dryers, as well as water treatment and power plants. These would support jobs back home, and giving away these products at government expense may have been cheaper overall. Maybe we should have done that in our current oversea adventure. ISTM we are delivering American-made goods anyway with no return - in the form of bombs and bullets, which does not seem to be winning over the hearts and minds.
It certainly is true that Americans hate foreign aid, negligible as it is. And even at that, most of the aid we do give essentially goes into American pockets–for example, hiring an American company to hire Americans to build a school with material bought in America. I made that up, but it’s emblematic of the way aid gets distributed.
We human barbarians never learn from our history or our mistakes. Bribing would have been a better idea. Nothing would have helped prevent ancilliary horror however, in surrounding countries. Now the USA is building its’ own Great Wall, as China did once, to keep out immigrants.
Sure, give those gooks a few shiny consumer goods and they’ll forget their dumb ideals. Let’s pretend for a moment that Cecil was seriously suggesting this. What would prevent Vietnam taking the cash and then continuing to fight for a unified Communist Vietnam? What could the US do? Send the troops back in?
Well, the US could have avoided the whole war for free if they’d told the French to get out after 1945. Ho reached out to the US on this, Vietnam. The vast mass of North Vietnamese were no more idealistic Communists than the South Vietnamese were idealistic capitalists, and Ho just wanted whitey gone.
Anyway, the question was how much did the Vietnam war cost the United States, so we could do the interesting thought experiment of how much we could have paid each Vietnamese person instead of killing them.
And, aldiboronti, if paying them off didn’t work, it would have been exactly as successful as the war, with fewer deaths.
I read Cecil’s reply to this question and immediately thought, “What a load of bull.” It makes some very flawed assumptions about the political aims of the communist North Vietnamese government. It also ignores the NVA’s willingness to commit all manner of gross human rights violations in order to complete its conquest of the country.
It makes about as much sense as these politicians today who suggest that “sitting down” with our enemies in the Middle East is going to magically solve all our problems. There’s very little common ground to be had with people whose religion/political ideology directs them to destroy you at any cost to themselves.
The question was pointless. It would be like asking how much yogurt it would take to construct a sphere the size of the moon. Who cares? The Vietnam War ended almost forty years ago. Why not stick to mourning the dead, honoring their sacrifices, and caring for the men who lived through it and still suffer from the after-effects of jungle combat?
Fail.
As others have pointed out, we could have bribed them, then had to fight them anyway.
Yeah, great job anticipating and successfully routing all of their attacks on US soil. Warning though: I think if the US invaded any European country and started massacring its civilians, some of them would fight back too. That’s grounds for pre-emptive war, is it not? After all, that kind of unmitigated aggression will not be tolerated.
"[Ho] makes a dozen appeals to US President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for help, insisting he is not a communist and suggesting that Indochina could be a “fertile field for American capital and enterprise.”
The original question was not pointless. Not to the men who fought, suffered, and died in a war the U.S. fought and lost for no good reason. It’s because of their sacrifice that we should think about ways to avoid wars like Vietnam…or in the Middle East.
Also, there is no “had to fight them anyway.” The war didn’t need to be fought, for any number of reasons; one of them is given in this post. Have you heard of the Pentagon Papers?
Maybe if the Clinton Administration’s Jamie Gorelick hadn’t directed the FBI and CIA not to talk to one another, our intel people might have connected the dots.