How does the US military classify our being kicked out of Vietnam?
First of all, Vietnam was NOT a “war”, it was an armed conflict.
The US Congress NEVER at any point passed a declaration of war (against North Vietnam).
Not only that, the US was not “defeated”-we withdrew, when it became obvious that “winning” was impossible.
Technically, sending US troops to Vietnam was a violation of the constituton, but nobody ever objected to it.
So, it was not a war and not a defeat; it was a debacle! 
Related question. Is there any truth behind what I was told about the way US military salutes (palm down) vs. how other nations like the UK do it (palm out). I was told that palm down signifies never having had to surrender/admit to losing a war.
Dingo’s kidneys?
There’s no official scoreboard on wars. People can claim that the United States won an overwhelming victory in Vietnam is they want to. Or call it a defeat or a loss or a tie or a stalemate or a withdrawal or whatever else they want.
The object was to hold Vietnam.
The US can say, ‘Oh we just withdrew’.
Fact is, the mission failed, call it waht you like interms of conflict, but to describe it as anything but a war is disingenuous.
All this is done to deny there was a war, when there was, and to deny defeat, when the non-war was lost.
The US lost, simple as that.
Great powers lose wars, Great Britain did it lots of times, Spain did it, China did, so why does the US have so many problems with simply accepting the reality?
I’ve been to the Pentagon many, many times, and I’ve never seen a scoreboard. Seriously, I do not believe there is any official military historians who categorize the outcome of a war into distinct outcomes, any more than there are people at the National Archives declaring Medicare, Head Start, or the National Science Foundation a success or failure.
But really, the government employs a number of historians, within the DOD, the military services, the State Department, and elsewhere. They generally do not make dictats that this or that is the “official” interpretation of some event.
Distinction without a difference. Besides, numerous DOD publications call it a war.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 gave the imprimatur of Congress for the use of military troops as the President saw fit. If you’re going to claim that Congress does not have the authority to pass a use of force resolution, you’re arguing against a congressional practice that dates back to 1798, the days of our Founding Fathers.
No.
Except for that thing called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. We’ve done this to death, but I continue to maintain that a) Congress passed the resolution, and b) the Constitution does not stipulate what form a declaration of war must take, therefore the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was perfectly valid, and therefore was not in violation of the Constitution.
So, what was the question again? Oh, yes, was the Vietnam War a defeat?If you’re willing to make the distinction between tactical and strategic, it was both. The United States, to the best of my knowledge, never once lost a battle against North Vietnam and their surrogates. Sure, there were some near-Pyrrhic victories, but the domination of the US in combat action is indisputable. However, nobody can maintain with a straight face that the United States won the Vietnam War. Therefore, it was a tactical success and a strategic failure. That greatly contributes to the issues that people continue to have with the war: people can’t make that distinction, and they can’t figure out how you can win everything and still lose.
An interesting observation that you make. Probably the mother of such incidents is the Tet Offensive (40 years ago). Wiki: Tet Offensive Militarily, the US inflicted far, far heavier casualties than they suffered. Yet, many are under the impression that the US suffered a military defeat during Tet. The US didn’t suffer a military defeat but it suffered a huge political defeat because Tet showed that the war was far from over and that the Viet Cong could rise up at any time. Tet signaled the downhill spiral into the quagmire.
Also, Tết showed that the enemy (in general) was more than willing to violate a ceasefire during a major holiday and (IIRC) smuggle weapons in coffins to get them to the future battlefields. It would be like fighting a European nation that violated a Christmas truce.
I’m not aware that there was any truce, either stated or implied, during the Tet holiday. Yes, Tet is THE major holiday in that part of the world but I’m not aware that the Vietcong or the NVA agreed to anything. I guess its like the Yom Kippur war that was intended to catch the Israelis off guard.
The Vietnamese nationalists were willing to take huge casualties and use any means possible to gain a unification victory. That’s why it was a guerrilla war.
We may never have had a division forced out of an area by direct enemy action (as opposed to giving up because certain areas like the Arizona AO were just too bloody), but I can give many examples of the US getting their butts kicked in battles from the LRRP to the company level. We lost a lot of battles to the NVA/VC, but we did ok on average.
No. The US by 1967 had overwhelming capability over the NVA. Political unwillingness and the growing body bag count in the new “in your living room” media reporting over a conflict with less than concrete outcomes won the day.
We fight our wars too easily at the outset (in terms of reasons why) and scratch our heads when a ramping up of military efforts runs into a long-term exposure.
We could have easily beaten the NVA, we just didn’t have the political will to commit. And the war’s rationale was questionable at best.
Sounds familiar.
Not to mention George Washington’s post-Christmas attack at the Battle of Trenton.
The funny thing about Tet was that it was a last ditch desperate attempt by the Viet Cong and it was soundly defeated. It was their last shot. And the US/South Vietnam repelled the attack and won soundly. It was even more effective militarily than hunting them down because they all came out in the open.
And yet it was looked at in society as a defeat. The media was able to turn a major victory into the perception of defeat.
Vietnam was not a “military” defeat - it was a defeat of politics and cultural willpower. The military had a specific set of objectives given to them by the civilian government and largely accomplished those goals effectively. If they were given the wrong goals by those outside the military, and ultimately lost support the same way - how could it be classified as a military defeat?
Eliminating the Viet Cong was one of the goals of the Tet Offensive. You have to remember that there were two different forces trying to overthrow the South Vietnamese government; the conventional military forces controlled by Hanoi and the underground guerilla forces in the South. Hanoi didn’t want a rival contesting their control when they took over, especially one that knew how to fight an underground war against government forces. So they persuaded the Viet Cong to step out into the open for a conventional attack. Any damage they did to the South helped Hanoi - and any damage they received in return also helped Hanoi.
Sure it sounds familiar. It’s just like Korea. We were beating the North Korean forces but when we got too close to China, the Chinese intervened. There’s no reason to doubt the same wouldn’t have happened in Vietnam if we had invaded the North.
Yes, the NVA and the VC held out in Hue - the divisional HQ of the 1st ARVN - for 26 days, against (at the end) hugely superior forces, despite not themselves having captured the whole fortress. The Siege of Khe Sanh went on for 2 1/2 months, and the Tet Offensive as a whole for 9 months.
Westmoreland had been claiming the North were on the verge of defeat for years, and victory was always just around the corner. At an address at the National Press Club on 21 November he reported that, as of the end of 1967, the Vietcong was “unable to mount a major offensive…I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing…We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view”. Yet this almost-defeated enemy managed to stage co-ordinated attacks across the entire battlefield. As others have said here, their losses were almost irrelevant; the official US line to their public that the enemy were at their last gasp was shattered and the public never fully believed them again. The danger of relentless unfounded optimism could not be clearer.
We can all used terms of nicety, such as strategic losses, tactical losses, but who is in control and who left ?
The mission failed, it does not matter what the reason was, it does not matter what the ratio of casualties was, the US lost.
As for consequencies, and future international relationships, all well and good, but that is post rationalisation.
“Another victory such as this and we are undone”
Vietnam really defied definitions like “defeat” and victory". The USA could have “won” in Vietnam-only it would have cost millions of lives. We could have destroyed Hanoi, wrecked Haiphong, and destroyed all of North Vietnam’s croplands. Instead, we played a curious game of escalation, hoping to force the North vietnamese to quit.
Only it didn’t work. So “winning” was not feasible, we opted for withdrawal, and hoped our soth Vietnamese “allies” would keep on fighting.
They didn’t.
FWIW (not a lot, I admit)