What does the military think is the reason why we lost in Vietnam?

Factual Questions
1

After every war, the military always reviews the conduct and outcome of the war, and revises it’s doctrines and strategies accordingly. In 1975 the US concluded the most unsuccessful military campaign in it’s history. Surely the Pentagon came to some formal conclusions as to how this happened, with recommendations on how to avoid it in the future. So what is the official opinion on why we lost[sub]*[/sub] in Vietnam.

[sub]* I’m aware that technically we didn’t lose- we “withdrew” from the conflict. But practically speaking, we lost.[/sub]

2

They weren’t allowed to fight the war as they saw fit. The politicians fought it through them.

3

I’m sure that there were a lot of lessons learned in Vietnam, but the one catchy phrase that emerged was not brought to the attention of the public until one of the “middle rank” officers from Vietnam rose to the position of Chief of Staff and confronted his own foreign war:

The Powell Doctrine

4

I think a lot of the military and more conservative political observers believe it was because of the politicians at home and the war protests not allowing the military to conduct the war their way. That may or not be the official position.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the main problem was both the military and civilian leadership thru most of the war couldn’t grasp the nature on the dispute nor the dynamics of the fight.

5

I way I heard it summed up was that: The way the military was allowed to fight the war, it couldn’t win. But if they HAD BEEN allowed to fight it in a way that would lead to victory, the politicians feared the response/retaliation that would come from the Soviets and Red China. So the our leaders tried to make it a running stalemate. Domestically, this didn’t work out so well in the long run, and we had to pull out anyway.

6

What are some examples of things the military would have done but were not allowed to do?
My impression – and I’m far from an expert and am ready to be corrected – is that the military accomplished everything a military can accomplish. That is, we kicked their asses. (I’ve always heard that we dropped more bombs on Vietnam and Laos than all previous wars combined. I think that deserves its own GQ thread.)

We didn’t “win” because there was no viable alternative to Ho Chi Minh. He was the people’s choice. The only way to “save” the Vietnamese from communism would be to destroy them.

But in typing this I’m realizing just how little I know about that war. I’m off to do some reading now.

7

** TGWATY ** is correct in that military terms, we kicked the Viet Cong and NVA’s butts. We won every single important battle, we killed 10 enemies for every soldier we lost, and the only reason the communist took over the South is that we pulled out due to political pressure at home. Even cases like the Tet offensive were military failures for communism; the thing I don’t get is that while the Tet offensive was seen as a political victory for communist forces by many, showing that the Viet Cong still posed a threat; but Tet actually caused the near destruction of the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force, with the brunt of the fighting later on being conducted by NVA regulars. If the military had stayed in Vietnam, and kept up the same tatics, just bring in more forces, and do even more bombing, we would have won by attrition - we were killing them ten time faster than we were losing men. With more forces and bombing we would have killed even more of them and eventually they wouldn’t have enough people left ot fight. This is assuming we don’t bring in too much force, else Russia or China might have decided to directly involve themselves in this conflict beyond giving North Vietnam military equipment.

8

In a total perspective, I’d agree with you to some extent. But we’re talking about the military perspective, and as such, I wouldn’t say practically speaking, we lost. The military did everything it was ever asked to do.

9

One of the bigegst lessons the military learned was not to let the media have open access to the battlefields. The sight of dead babies had a powerful effect on world and national opinion. This reached its peak in the falklands and Gulf War 1 where news was tightly controlled by the military superbly.

Interestingly the military has let thousands of embedded reporters into GW 2. They obviosly though that (i) their smart weapons would lo longer lead to horrible civilian casualties and (ii) The war would be over quickly with lots of cheering Iraqis flowering their soldiers with thanks. I think they will regret their desicion if this war drags on to a Stalingrad type battle

10

The ‘Hearts and Minds’ campaign was certainly lost IMO.

11

[Dana Carvey as George Bush, Sr.]

We have learned the lesson of Vietnam.

And that is: “Stay out of Vietnam!” :smiley:

[Dana Carvey]

12

Dana Carvey? Hah! Princess Bride:

13

Well, the Politicans argument is rarely heard anymore. It is a (fake German accent) stab in the back (/fake German accent) argument that simply doesn’t hold water.

The Politicians didn’t make us have one-year tours with six-month command tours. The Politicans didn’t have us deploy a armored brigade.

On the other hand it is the responsibility of porfessional soldiers to tell the Pols what we need and then to get it. We needed permission to go north, to force reform down the RVN’s throat and a lot of other stuff. Professional soldiers should have advised the Pols of the bad crack into which our tails were caught.

Nobody did that. How many generals resigned over Vietnam? Did you guess just one? Then you guessed one too high.

I am a grad of Leavenworth and Newport. The loss of the Vietnam War, and how we lost it is quite openly discussed.

14

Yes, but in what sense that would be “winning?” Wait. I forgot I’m talking to the dread Cthulhu here. :eek:

Paul in Saudi, I’d like to see you elaborate on why we lost. Or point me to a site that you think is correct.

15

TGWATY is one hundred percent right.

To use an old joke, the problem with Vietnam was that it was full of Vietnamese.

The war was lost. The battles were won. To claim that the war weas lost because of military errors is to entirely miss the point, really. The decision not to invade North Vietnam, or the decision to deploy tanks, or the decision to do this or that or the other thing, all those points are basically irrelevant. The U.S. armed forced outperformed the NVA and the VC by a huge, huge margin. Making it a huger margin would not have caused the war to be won.

To win a war, you must have a specific objective that must be won:

Gulf War 1.0 - Kick Iraq out of Kuwait
Gulf War 2.0 - Conquer Iraq
World War II- Conquer Germany and Japan
Korean War - Kick North Korea out of South Korea
Civil War - Conquer the Confederacy

If the specific objective is winnable, then the war is winnable. The Vietnam War, very simply, did not have a specific and winnable objective. The war was originally sold as defending South Vietnam from North Vietnam. Truth be told, however, the South Vietnamese government was (after a few US-supported shenanigans) not really a government at all, but was rather a puppet pseudo-government of a foreign empire (the United States) with all the legitimacy and public support you would expect of such a government (none at all.) So the USA was in the untenable position of defending South Vietnam from the South Vietnamese. In other words, they were trying to “save” a people from conquest by, in part, the people they were saving. It was a Mobius strip situation.

With all due respect to my American friends, the truth of the matter was that the Vietnam War degenerated to the point that, basically, the United States was fighting a war in order to further the occupation and subjugation of Vietnam. Granted, that was because they were afraid of Communism, but from the Vietnamese perspective the Americans were simply the inheritors of the French mantle of occupation, who in turn had loaned it out to the Japanese. That many not have been the original intent of Kennedy and Johnson, but by 1970 that was the practical situation. A boiled frog error, as it were The only way the United States could have forced Vietnam to accept occupation, as has been pointed out, would have been to kill all the Vietnamese. Of course, then the USA would have won nothing at all anyway.

Realistically there is no scenario you could envision that would have resulted in a U.S. win, no matter what you let the military do. Invade North Vietnam? You’d just have to occupy the entire country in the face of fierce resistance, probably resulting in eventual withdrawal and humiliation. Nuke it? You’d start a nuclear war. Send more troops? How would that help when the exisitng troops were kicking asses and taking names anyway?

The U.S., as I suggested in another thread, lost the Vietnam War for exactly the same reason Great Britain lost the American Revolution. In fact, the two wars bear a great many similarities.

16

To hear them talk, it appears that the only reason the U.S. lost in Vietnam was Bill Clinton’s evasion of the draft.

17

What, nobody has mentioned Jane Fonda and the hippie protesters? Wasn’t it all their fault, according to some, and an example of how expressions of dissent cannot be tolerated now?

Insert smilie as appropriate.

18

Does our current situation in Iraq sound a bit like a “Moebius” situation as well? I know this treads into (okay, downright stomps into) GD, but I’m not so sure we’ve learned this lesson at all. Here again is a war fought for political reasons. It is occupying a country that does not want to be occupied. I can’t believe people really believed the Iraqis would resemble the French during its liberation. :rolleyes: Again, we are saving people who may not want to be saved. And we’re “saving” them from themselves.

We’re in a load of trouble, friends.

19

But of course, we also invaded and occupied Germany and Japan against their will, and that worked out pretty well. The mere fact that we are invading a country says nothing about the long term prospects for the invasion.

And history of course has many examples of one country invading another country, and ruling the invaded country for centuries. Resistance to the invaders doesn’t automatically eventually succeed, many times the resistance is, well, futile.

The main problem with occupying Vietnam wasn’t that we couldn’t occupy it. We could. But we couldn’t occupy it while it was being supplied by China and the Soviet Union, and also we couldn’t occupy it while maintaining the sort of society we had grown accustomed to at home. As a liberal democracy it wasn’t going to work. We could have transformed our society into one capable of occupying Vietnam, but that would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

20

There is some hope that the situation in Iraq will differ from Viet Nam. Firstly, Iraqi love for Saddam Hussein is, I believed, coerced, so he doesn’t compare as a leader to Ho Chi Minh. (Ho Chi Minh was dead long before the U.S. pulled out of Viet Nam, but his presence lingers.) Much of our long-term strategy relies on the assumption that Iraqi loyalty to its leadership will vanish once Hussein no longer has the power of life-and-death over them.

Iraq has never been occupied, at least since the Arabs defeated the Persians. Viet Nam has endured a long history of occupation. The Chinese first, then Mongolians, then the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and finally the U.S. Viet Nam’s history is an endless cycle of popular uprisings pushing out the invaders, some years of freedom, then re-invasion. The U.S. faced a bit of a hard-sell in saying that we would be a different kind of invader. Many in the South appreciated our support, and there are still many who left as refugees who continue to fight the war in their heads to this day, but there were always deep suspicions of U.S. forces.

The U.S. did nothing to dispel these suspicions by bombing civilian targets. That 10 to 1 kill ratio quoted was not purely (or even mostly) soldier to soldier. The majority of villages in the north were bombed, many repeatedly, killing civilians and fighters alike.* In modern warfare, we have “colateral” damage, but we bend over backwards to minimize it. That may stymie the war progress somewhat, but it will increase the chances that an occupying force will be accepted. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

  • The U.S. by no means was the only cause of civilian suffering. The Viet Cong was every bit as brutal as the U.S. was, often more so.