As others are saying, our only chance for victory was to back the right side in the first place. We had the ability to tell France to get the hell out of there after WWII, we should have done it then. The South Vietnamese government barely represented a majority in the south, if a majority there at all, so we were supporting a string of military dictators who wanted to maintain a minority rule of a nation, primarily for their own personal benefit as far as I can tell.
As a side issue, can anyone else think of another Head of Government, apart from Lon Nol, whose name is a palindrome?
It indeed sounds exactly similar.
Well, except that the US was fighting in Vietnam longer than WWII lasted. Also, the US started off with limited bombing and gradually built up the force used in an effort to get the North (and the Soviets behind them) to negotiate a peace. This had the side effect of allowing the North (and the Soviets and Chinese) ample opportunities to build up defenses and reinforce the Viet Cong, as well as adapt tactically and even strategically to the slow escalation and stretch out the war indefinitely. The thinking on the side of we could have ‘won’ in Vietnam through pure military force is that had we gone in full bore right from the start and used all of the conventional force at our disposal we could have either destroyed North Vietnam’s ability to fight or forced them to the negotiating table from a point of strength and negotiated at a minimum a halt in hostilities including the North’s support of the Viet Cong.
Now, I don’t believe this would have happened without those goals and a fixed definition of what winning would be, but you are strawmaning the position and handwaving it aside without addressing it’s actual meat. A valid counter argument would be to point out that the Soviet and Chinese response to this was unknown.
If you fight wars in other countries, you need to be doing it on behalf of - and with - the peasantry. ‘South Vietnam’ was a pretty disengenuous concept from the start, at least from a non-US perspective.
Problem for the US in all its imperial wars is the side it supports is generally self-selecting (not of the peasantry). The Mujahideen of the late 80s would be an exception for obv reasons.
Yeah. You can’t win at something until you’ve defined what winning is. This is a political failure, IMO, rather than a military failure.
There was never a question of whether the USA could have defeated North Vietnam militarily. We’d just finished kicking the collective asses of German and Japan (with help) on a world wide front. We had the means to do any job, just no idea what the job was in this case.
But the US and its Allies won in such an unequivocal way largely because the German and Japanese militaries engaged in conventional warfare and their leadership surrendered unconditionally once they saw the writing on the wall. This was not the case with Vietnam, where the US had to deal with an insurgency campaign. Even if the US had captured and physically held North Vietnam, the insurgency would have continued because the VC would simply have retreated to the Chinese border.
All the money in the world wasn’t going to help. The South Vietnamese government was incredibly corrupt, a great deal of the money was essentially lost to corruption, and the money was never withdrawn. Congress cut funding in fall 1974 for the upcoming fiscal year from $1 billion to $700 million. The US left the ARVN with a huge arsenal of weaponry, and did continue to supply them after we left. The Air Force of the Republic of Vietnam was the 4th largest in the world when we left in 1973. All the money and equipment in the world wasn’t going to produce an army that wasn’t corrupt, incompetent, poorly motivated, poorly led, and largely unwilling to fight. For example:
The PAVN captured huge amounts of war materials when the Republic of Vietnam fell. The ‘shortages’ experienced by the ARVN in the final offensive in 1975 were the result of corruption and incompetence, not an actual lack of material.
I do. See post 18, there were 320,000 Chinese troops in North Vietnam from 1965-69. There is no question about Chinese intervention; they were already there. And to repeat, unlike Korea in 1950, this time China had the atomic bomb as well.
A long history which they were able to entirely put aside and cooperate quite well together in order to kick first the French and then the Americans out of Vietnam. You’d do well to note the reason for the Sino-Vietnamese War also, it was a Chinese punitive expedition in retaliation for Vietnam’s invasion of China’s client Cambodia which Vietnam invaded to remove the Khmer Rouge from power (among the many, many, many groups of victims of the Cambodian genocide was the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia). Oh, and for the sake of accuracy, the war was in 1979.
The world has changed. Due to nuclear weapons, you can’t fight unlimited wars anymore because the upper limit has become everyone on both sides is killed.
We could fight Germany or Japan all the way to their complete defeat in the forties. But we couldn’t fight China or the Soviet Union that way in the sixties.
So we needed to ask ourselves serious questions. Could we stop North Vietnam from attacking South Vietnam? Could we defeat North Vietnam without occupying the country? Could we occupy North Vietnam without fighting a war against China and the Soviet Union? Could we defeat the Chinese and the Soviets in a limited war in North Vietnam?
You can define this as a political failure or a military failure. But what it is is facing reality.
What’s ironic is that most of the South Vietnamese government was derived from Catholic refugees who were from the North and evacuated after 1954 by the CIA, to the South, to take charge over a predominantly Buddhist peasantry, and who decided quite stupidly to oppressed the Buddhists.
What would have been required? What the side that won had. (And the right side won, I suppose.)
Why assume that the USA has any business winning a given war of imperialism, or ability) to do so?
But, if you “face reality” and do nothing, it could be perceived as giving carte blanche to the ‘Commies’.
I can almost hear the sound of dominos falling.
The reality is that the US could have kept North Vietnam from ever taking over South Vietnam, but didn’t have the will to pay that price. Which is why we should never have gotten involved in the first place. But the reality is our lack of will compared to the North Vietnamese Communists, not our ability to prevent them from taking over South Vietnam.
LBJ’s biggest miscalculation was to think that he could make the war a test of wills between us and the North and actually win on those terms.
Don’t keep it a secret. Tell us what we could have done to win the war if only we had had the will.
Been taking their sweet-ass time to fall, haven’t they ? 
Any day now…
You have to keep the plan to end the war secret for it to work, just ask Nixon. Openly admitting to the public that all you are looking for in negotiations is a ‘decent interval’ between the withdrawal of US troops and the fall of South Vietnam to the communists in order to claim “peace with honor” is sort of self defeating.
As long as we were there, North vietnam couldn’t take over South Vietnam. Simple as that.
So you don’t have a plan for winning the war. You think we should have just kept fighting the war indefinitely.
We spend twenty years fighting in Vietnam. So I think we showed plenty of “will” doing that. What do you think we would have gained if we had fought for sixty years?
North Vietnam had the exact same plan.