I’m not an expert on US millitary history, but weren’t there signficant changes to the millitary after the war? Like the shift to an all-volunteer force and a revamp of deployment strategies and the like?
I think Vietnam scared the hell out of every President since Nixon. No one wanted “another Vietnam” and so when any military action looked like it would last more than a few days involving more than a few casualties the Executive branch really thought long and hard on A) whether it was worth it politically and B) Could they sell it to the public.
It also lead to a few actions to be called off when things soured, Somalia comes to mind.
It changed how the world saw them and how they viewed fighting in the rest of the world
It gave others the impression that the West, specifically The United States does not have the stomach to to fight when its nose gets bloodied.
It also showed that if a people is determined enough to die for a cause and organized enough they can beat any super power whose people are not as equally commited and willing to die for their cause.
Will Iraq turn out the same? Perhaps.
I mean the Iraq army proper is gone, the capital has been taken and yet there are still attacks on US and UK troops and sabotage to infrastructiure.
Looking back The NV regular army was also crushed in in each engagment with the US taking horrible casualties but it was the United States that backed away from the fight in the end. If the Iraqi civilians mount an organized resistence I can see home support for American troops to remain would dry up fast enough.
The United States had never made any committment to aid Britain or France in a war with Germany. So faulting the US for not declaring war in 1939 is meaningless.
Many totalitarian regimes have justified themselves by declaring that only dictatorships are “strong” enough to win wars and democracies are too “soft” to stay in a war in the face of adversity. The United States is one of the countries that has been frequently singled out as such. American victories are dismissed as a result of overwhelming force and cheap victories rather than an example of ongoing committment.
Our willingness to continue fighting in Vietnam for years, even when it became apparent there was no prospect for a quick victory, showed that the US was capable of a sustained war effort.
Vietnam was independant. The war was about what kind of government would control Vietnam.
Yes, the shift to an all-volunteer military occurred shortly thereafter. The US military was not in a good way in 1973. While the US never lost a sizable engagement against any NLF forces, the army that left Vietnam in 1973 wasn’t the army that went into Vietnam in 1965. There were discipline and morale problems of every sort. Fragging officers, rampant drug use, refusal to carry out orders, etc. Moving to an all-volunteer force was seen in part as a good way to clean house.
bolding mine
I was just a nipper when it was over but I don’t have the impression that Viet Nam “brought us to our knees”. I thought we gave up in collective disgust, shame and confusion. Stopped chasing our losses, in gambler’s terms. That and our focus inward on our own problems.
I can’t believe there are actually still people who believe in domino theory. Look, like everyone else said before, it’s a thoroughly discredited theory. The loss of Vietnam didn’t turn all of Southeast Asia into a communist fortress. As Susanann said, not even the people who were expounding domino theory believed in it. Domino theory is wrong That’s all there is to it.
You are correct. The US didn’t lose the war, it simply left Vietnam.
True, but it failed in it’s objective, which was to establish a stable, anti-communist dictatorship (ala Indonesia or the Phillipines).
Correct. But, it wasn’t the military failure that led to the withdrawal. More of a public relations one back home. This failure was caused by the lack of direction and poor leadership shown by the US government at that time, IMHO.
I just wanted to make sure that no one was pushing the widely held belief that we were physically, militarily pushed out of the country in failure. That’s not true. We decided it wasn’t worth it anymore and left. Ironically, after defeating the Tet offensive, we were closer to a “victory” than at any other time of the war. However, the public outcry that resulted from this fighting led to the US withdrawal.
On preview: This was originally going to be a reply to Debaser’s post that the US didn’t lose the war. Things have been clarified a bit, but for what it’s worth here it is:
I know that this isn’t a terribly popular view, but the US lost the war in Vietnam. There was no military defeat of US forces, there wasn’t even anything approaching it, but the US committed itself to a war that was unwinnable, and was seen that way by even those making the decisions. One need only look at the Pentagon Papers or McNamara’s rather self-serving memoirs to see this. While it is true that in the end the US just left, in leaving it abandoned the Republic of Vietnam to face an inevitable defeat. Nixon knew this, Kissinger knew this, and Thieu knew this.
Hence my original sarcastic one line answer of ‘Humility?’ at the beginning of the thread. Admitting to defeat isn’t an easy thing to do, especially when there was no actual military defeat, and it was the only war that one could say the US lost. It was America’s will to fight that was in the end defeated.
Good thing you put “victory” in quotation marks there. As we should have learned there, and may (I hope) be relearning in Iraq, it’s what happens afterward that makes the long-term difference. Sure, it’s possible that a series of battlefield defeats may have caused Ho to abandon battlefield fighting, and that the decision would have allowed Johnson or Nixon to claim it was a “victory”. But afterward, you’d still have a well-armed populace engaging in endless guerrilla attacks against the garrisons of an occupying foreign force, trying to make them abandon it. The body bags would still be coming home in a constant stream. It would have been abandoned without permanent gain eventually anyway.
And yet we still hear from some quarters that we could have “won” in Vietnam if not for those liberals/hippies/reporters/Comsymps/appeasers etc., in disregard of the consideration that, from the Vietnamese point of view, they were fighting for their own national liberation against a series of foreign invaders of which we were simply the latest. There is no factual basis that I know of to say that the North was fighting essentially “for communism”, just that they were happy to use Soviet military help for their own ends and would spout whatever happy talk would keep it coming. I think you could say the same about almost any third-world dictatorship in the Cold War; that they’d say whatever it took to get superpower help consolidating their own domestic control, making the US and USSR essentially bid against each other in the process.
It doesnt matter how many battles you win, or if you win all the big battles(sizable engagements), what matters is who wins the last battle.
The war is “won” by who wins the last battle.
Even Pham van Dong said it after the war was over when he met with american military leaders in a discussion who said the same thing you are saying, but he was not the first , nor the last to say it.
Correct. The vietnamese fougth the chinese, the japanese, the french and the americans. They fought anybody and everybody who was foreign in their land. They wanted independence, and they got it.
I hope the lesson we learned from Vietnam is that in any type of confrontation, you should NOT play “the other guy’s game”. For example, the Vietcong had dug extensive tunnels throughout South Vietnam and the VC used these tunnels quite effectively. So, how did we deal with this? Among other things “tunnel rats” would volunteer to go into the tunnels for reconnaissasnce and to see if there were any documents left by VC that might have strategic importance to the American troops. These “tunnel rats” faced incredible danger from the VC and they were damned brave individuals.
However, is this great military strategy ? I don’t think so. We were playing their “game”. Heck, if I were to challenge Mike Tyson to a contest of my choosing, the absolute, positively LAST “test” I would choose would be boxing!!! Maybe a game of chess would be a wiser decision.
Granted this analogy is probably a gross oversimplification of a rather complex time in America’s history but I think it does make its point.
America gained a lot. We taught the world that if any country attempts to be a sovereign nation outside of US imperial influence, we will invade you, destroy your economy, defoliate your forestss,rape your women, burn your children, and kill all the males over the age of 16 (direct quote from Powell). And it worked. As someone pointed out, the previously resistant Vietnamese markets have now been softened up and Vietnam is participating in US global economic imperialism. After all, nobody can live on rice alone.
Yes, of course, the US deliberately lost the war so that it could work it’s way into the Vietnamese market by not trading with the People’s Republic of Vietnam after the war. Don’t suppose you have a cite for that Powell quote Roger_Mexico?:rolleyes:
I don’t need a cite, I have a photogenic memory.
And people criticize me when i say its fashionable to hate the US.
I notice you don’t hold the French, who started the war, to the same standard. Or China, which made Vietnam a dependent satellite afterwards.
On the plus side, the Vietnam war created a strong anti-war mentality in americans, causing US leadership to want to win wars in weeks instead of years.
Plus, all the deaths (millions died) created a revulsion to the human destruction war caused, starting a desire for less lethal ward, which we have now. Many thousands of Iraqis died in the Iraq war, but that is not a giant number considering that we overthrew such a strong country.
Also, i read a report once that said human rights weren’t an integral part of US foreign policy before Carter. Carter ran on a human rights platform because of revulsion over Vietnam. After carter, Reagan tried to dismantle the human rights programs but failed, and human rights became part of US foreign policy after that.
China didn’t make Vietnam a satellite afterwards. China and Vietnam had an historic rivalry going back centuries, and fought a war with each other in 1979. I’m not sure Vietnam created the worldwide revision for war, it’s always been there. What it definitely did was make the US more picky in where, when, and how it put its peoples lives at risk.