You really don’t understand anything about how militaries work, do you? You think that MACV operated on a voluntary basis? That it posted a notice in the Army Times asking for volunteers to sign up for MACV and exactly 16,000 replied? And the post you were replying to asking if I “was sure” said something about the US chain of command.
That’s not how militaries work. Individuals can request a particular assignment. Feel free to ask members on this board who have served how likely one is to get the assignment they request rather than the one where the military decides they are needed and tells them to go. When JFK ordered first 500 additional Special Forces and military advisors to MACV, then increased the total to 11,000 and then to 16,000, that was the US military chain of command cutting orders for the deployment, not asking for 16,000 volunteers to sign up for an after-school program and then waiting to see if they can get 16,000 people to sign up.
I should also add that I was being generous in stating that calling them both ‘volunteers’ and ‘advisors’ was Pentagon-speak of the time to minimize what was actually going on to the public. ‘Advisors’ was the Pentagon-speak of the day. Calling them ‘volunteers’ is an invention purely of your own.
Sometimes they ask for volunteers, even offer incentives to get them (such as by increasing the odds that if they have a particular assignment they want to request later, they just might get it). It’s how I ended up in Iraq (though not everyone in my unit was a volunteer). Sat down across from my detailer during a ship visit (that is, he and the other detailers for my warfare community were visiting the ship I was on), I told him I wanted a GSA to Iraq or Afghanistan, and after actually trying to convince me otherwise he gave me a list to choose from.
FWIW, I was actually an advisor to the Iraqi Navy (which they have, though it is very small). Now, to be fair, others with the unit were not volunteers, but the mere idea of seeking volunteers is hardly foreign to the military.
I do not think this article, or the author’s subsequent book, says what you think it says.
The article concludes with this sentence: “The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.”
That is very different from your claim. The article, and the book, go into more detail and those details do not support your claim.
I think in calling 16,000 US soldiers in Vietnam “volunteer advisors” the poster was trying to imply they were more like the volunteers of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.
@DrDeth you’ve stated your victory conditions for the Vietnam War. As I recall the US government never coherently stated what its victory conditions were. That was a problem. We weren’t making the world safe for democracy, or beating the Axis. We were just there, until we weren’t.
I don’t recall offhand if it was ever stated as an official policy. But I believe the victory the United States was seeking was the establishment of a secure non-communist republic in the south; basically to make the Republic of Vietnam the equivalent of the Republic of Korea. The two things that were needed for this were for the government of the Republic of Vietnam to gain legitimacy among its population and the negotiation of some settlement with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam where it would cease actively attacking.
Both of those were of course made rather tricky to do since the existence of two Vietnams wasn’t supposed to have happened; per the 1954 Geneva Conference national elections were supposed to be held, elections which Ho Chi Minh would overwhelmingly have won. South Vietnam rested its existence on Diem refusing to allow national elections to be held and instead holding a referendum in 1955 on the future of South Vietnam, a referendum which Diem ‘won’ with the rather suspicious amount of 98.9% of the vote.
There are many opportunities to travel the world in the Military. Your first step after Basic Training will most likely be your job training school, followed by travel to your first duty assignment. You can even volunteer for overseas duty if you want to see more of the world.
You are seriously basing your understanding of how military deployments work on “lies my recruiting officer told me?” Care to explain what any of that has to do with the Commander in Chief ordering 16,000 personnel to MACV?
And once war was on, there was the major difference that it was not a war with a defined frontline that you could eventually freeze and secure and keep the other guys on their side with one or two US divisions stationed as a tripwire at the DMZ.
The notion that a military victory is meaningful outside of the context of strategic, moral, material–political–objectives is naive. As von Clausewitz noted, “the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.” The notion that the US military was somehow prevented from victory by a political elite that lacked the Will to win sounds a little like the “Dolchstosslegende” (“stabbed in the back legend”) used by the right in Germany after World War I.
Which in our case instead of motivating a fascist takeover gave good business opportunities to Chuck Norris and Sly Stallone (and others) a decade later…
Given the efforts by historians to debunk the Vietnam “Dolchstosslegende,” including the author cited by a poster above, and the posturing of some US politicians around the war, it may have been baleful enough.
John Kennedy was not an ultrahawk, so historians have had to sort through mixed evidence. Here I’ll cherry-pick Manchester’s Glory and the Dream (1974). Emphasis added:
Kennedy agonized over both the Vietnam and space issues. In the first of them he may even have been on the verge of withdrawing from Indochina. Kenneth O’Donnell, his chief of staff, has said that he planned to get out in his second term, and before flying to Texas on his last journey the President has issued an order to bring back the first 1000 US military advisers. (According to O’Donnell, Lyndon Johnson quietly rescinded the order after the return from Dallas.) There were other signs that Kennedy was moving towards disengagement. David Halberstam, who cannot be called a friendly critic on this issue, believes that Kennedy had made up his mind but “did not want to rush too quickly, to split his administration unnecessarily. There was always time.”
I have no opinion on the OP, except that steps towards war are apparently easier than withdrawal: political leaders pay a disproportionate price for military loss.