Looking at it objectively, the US lost in Vietnam.They only fought to bail out the french who themselves were completely incompetent as well. The mission was to protect the french colonies in "Indochina" and to stop the spread of communism. The french jumped ship, and communism spread not only into Vietnam, but into Laos and Cambodia too. Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?
DELET THIS
Even the best teams sometimes lose to a complete shit team in sports.
>>1107596
The US lost Vietnam because it went in with poorly defined objectives, did not have a coherent exit plan, and overall did not understand a god damn thing about the people of Vietnam, why they were fighting, and how they saw them.
Alot of that can be said about Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
>Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?
Aircraft carriers, nukes/ICBMs and a powerful economy. Are you implying the US is NOT a superpower?
Guerilla warfare is simply that effective. Armies in a defensive position have an extreme advantage in this area, it's all that it comes down to.
I remember listening to an interview from an officer during the vietnam war who wrote a book, I forgot his name. He said that about half of American casualties were due to traps. That's extremely effective and demoralizing.
>>1107639
Casualties are not fatalities. You may get a bamboo shoot stuck through your foot and incapacitated but you probably aren't going to die from it.
>>1107652
What's the effective difference in determining a victor?
>>1107596
>Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?
We can nuke you?
>>1107655
Morale, probably.
>>1107596
>It's a "The NVA were just rice farmers with AK-47's" episode
if you wanna play that game, why is China considered a superpower if they got BTFO by the zipperheads right after the US got out?
Home field advantage.
The gooks had a thorough understanding of the land and were masters at guerrilla warfare. They knew that the best way to beat the US was to bleed it dry slowly.
The US made it harder on itself by going full evil empire, slaughtering whole villages, incinerating landscapes, and dropping untold amounts of ordinance on poor mud farmers. This caused them to public support for the war, which added to the attrition.
Also, the yanks had poorly defined strategic goals and could simply be ground to a halt through hit and run tactics.
>>1107656
A lot of other countries have nukes, friendo.
>>1107639
>Guerilla warfare is simply that effective
except that is a very simplified view of the Vietnam War. The vast majority of the effective combat strength of the communist forces was the NVA (which had near-parity in terms of equipment quality), who, while unable to defeat the Americans, were able to not lose because the US could not invade North Vietnam for political reasons. With their entire half of the country practically a safe haven, the US was unable to actually win, especially given how incompetent the Arvins were
>>1107660
Being afraid every single step that you took was the whole point.
>>1107596
Can someone inform me why Korea was a good war that had a good reason for us entering while Vietnam was a shit war that we shouldn't have gone into?
>>1107773
Actually only eight other countries have nukes, and really only North Korea is a laughable nation, while like India and Pakistan are the only other ones that aren't super powers
Rolling Thunder wasn't fully utilized
Liberals back home held too much influence
They never lost a single battle
The problem was they just didn't know what the victory conditions of the war. It's like the war on terror where they dive head first into a war they can't really see the ending to.
>>1107671
They also BTFO'd France before the US got in.
>>1107856
Neither was the Korean war, we just sort of excepted the Norks to surrender the moment they saw the red white and blue. We also couldn't put all of our forces in Korea because of the nuclear threat. China and the Soviets were supporting the North, and if we shit on them to hard they might have had to intervene. The Korean war was a stalemate, returning the borders back to before the war; with communism in the south being avert, but the north still being communist. Jokes on the north though, because North Korea is North Korea
>>1107889
But looking back, imagine if North Korea was allowed to control all of Korea. That's a huge amount of people living in the most Orwellian type of government possible, and the United States and the UN prevented that.
We went to Vietnam and we failed, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, but now today Vietnam is not that bad of a nation, I mean it's doing the best it can, but it's certainly not a North Korea.
Is it because the South Vietnamese didn't like South Vietnam but the South Koreans liked South Korea? I just can't put my finger on it.
>>1107905
mostly because ho chi minh was a based nationalist leader like Tito rather than a Soviet puppet like Kim il sung
guy just didn't want his country oppressed and the US confused it with "dirty commie trying to take away out freedoms!"
>>1107933
That makes sense, thanks friend
>>1107905
I am not entirely sure what you are asking, but it is pretty easy to have our allies become traitors when you continually bomb their towns because you cant tell who is an enemy and who isnt. There was a really clear distinction between a north Korean and a south Korean, but in Vietnam they all just blended together because there were communist forces on all sides rather than just one border line. After world war 2, the entire Korean peninsula was a completely new nation, but the North was heavily Chinese PLA influenced while the south had US/British/Australian influences. Everyone in Vietnam had the French and Americans, but to differing degrees. sorry for rambling
>>1107949
*hated the French
Vietnam still lost. Their last major Tet offensive was a complete military failure.
>>1107949
>Everyone in Vietnam had the French and Americans, but to differing degrees.
I wouldn't say that, a rather large portion of South Vietnamese did anything they could to get the fuck out. The US and Canada accepted tons of them.
>>1107957
>Vietnam still lost
Last time I checked the US left Vietnam from a humiliating 20 year conflict that left it politically divided and internationally hated.
>>1107652
There were plenty of traps that led to death numnuts
Same reason why the American revolution was an embarrassment to the Brits
poor management, diplomacy, and internal pressures at home.
also the realization that the loss didn't really hurt anything but their pride (which was easily gain back by being the most powerful fucks in the world).
If the US were to go to war with any nation in the world, the odds would be in its favor.
USA never invaded North Vietnam during the conflict, only bombed it. Had it been invaded, the war would be over quite sooner. But the fear from USSR and China's retaliation was too great.
There are MacDonalds in Vietnam, and a lot of clothes and shoes are produced there. In the end, the United States won.
war is a means to a political ends nothing else matters
>>1107596
>kill millions of jungle gooks
>They kill 50,000
>Hur `Merica so incompetent
>>1107987
Okay still does not change the fact we fucked their shit up. Have you seen the overall fatalities? Sure we lost pretty much every goal set but we still pushed their shit in
>>1107966
The U.S. won (if you could call it that) tactical battles when pitted against NVA like in Ia Drang Valley, the fact that only Hue fell to commie hands after Text, which was supposed to be a nationwide uprising, and Hue didn't stay occupied too long, but we dropped the ball majorly on every other aspect so what good did winning battles do?
>>1108374
Did any of that matter at all? Are they a threat now? Or any time after that?
>>1108280
>fast food chains in Vietnam
This, culture and shitty food still exported so
10/10 would police action again
>>1108379
that's what I'm saying, the battles were pointless and not worth casualties with the way things have ended up
>>1107596
We underestimated our enemy. It sounds too simple to be true but it is, and that pic is the exact mindset that typified the US' loss in Vietnam.
US: "We have more soldiers and weapons, shouldn't we naturally win?"
NVA: "Lol, welcome to the jungle bitches."
Insurgencies are nasty as fuck
You need to kill an entire villaige to make sure an insurgency cant rise up in that area. Because the army is potentially every civilian.
The biggest problem with modern warfare is that an army can spring up literally overnight potentially anywhere.
Vietnam was military perssonel wanting ww2 glory and getting only spooks.
The way to win against one is a territory and ideological game. You make your own insurgency. If we would have funded militant democratic groups and armed them the communists would have lost. But back then that was almost unheard of, i think afghanistan, the successful us backed insurgency in al qaeda, was later. So we did learn.
You cant kill an army that is only their in name. But you can sure as hell turn them against the very people they are figting for.
>>1107596
How is the US incompetent for losing Vietnam?
>>1108433
It has less to do with the war itself and more with the PR. The US losing a war isn't catastrophic itself, but the fact that we got significantly more than we bargained for and how the government was so panicked by this obvious misstep that they royally fucked their relationship with the press and the citizenry to maintain an illusion of swift success in the war, and the fact that that illusion was so easily dismantled by their underestimation of the power of television journalism (at the height of the Tet Offensive no less). The incompetence of the US in Vietnam says less about its tactical mistakes and more about its inability to accept accountability to the public after more than two decades of perpetuating that sense of American exceptionalism.
(IMO of course)
>>1107596
The Americans won every battle and killed far more Vietnamese. The problem was that they had no clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish, so the war just dragged on until public opinion basically forced them to withdraw.
>"I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work."
LBJ and the military industrial complex.
>They assassinate Kennedy.
>LBJ creates a false incident at Gulf of Tonkin
>massive ramp up of military in Vietnam.
>muh domino theory to excuse it all
>military is handicapped the entire war because soviet and chinese are in north vietnam. USA doesn't want china in the war or the soviets invading europe.
>military industrial complex makes fucking bank
>war gets extremely unpopular due to new levels of media coverage.
>democrat party melts down
>nixon has to escalate and expand the war to force the north to the peace table.
>watergate. democrats get congress in the midterm election
>congress violates treaties and pulls all material support to the South.
>north invades years after the peace treaty was signed
>south is fucking shit because of corruption
>boomers continue to go on hating the war, the veterans, etc
>>1107596
>the US is some kind of superpower?
Natural fortress, European refugee scientists, more natural resources and topsoil than pretty much any other country, all their rivals fought each other several times.
Honestly, if that place wasn't full of Americans, they would be richer than Norwegians, have no enemies and work three days a week.
>>1107596
>outdated weapons
when the war started, the ak47 out performed the US infantry standard m1 carbine
>>1108873
Fuck off Socialist.
>>1108429
>Afghanistan/Al Qaeda and success used in the same sentence
>>1108280
Not to mention they're trying to buddy up to us due to China acting like they own everything in Asia.
>>1108881
The US used the M14 rifle at the start of the war, not the M1 carbine.
They quickly replaced that with the excellent M16.
Liberals, blame them
Without them, the US would be raising the flag in Hanoi but no, thanks to liberals, Vietnam went to shit, and it's still shit, it could have become North/South Korea type of situation but no, the whole nation became shit, everyone there hates the communists and loves America, France (and Japan for some odd reason)
But hey, if they had won they war, I'll be there working in a Nikes factory for 12 cent a day or working in automobiles if the country becomes South Korea 2.0 instead of shitposting in America
Thank you liberals (I'm not a fucking boat person)
>>1109094
they let north vietnamese immigrate?
>>1109107
Fuck no
They let Veterans of the South and their immediate families immigrate, gave amnesty
My Gramp spent 9 years in a commie gulag to be here, I'm amazed he survived
Thank you Reagan
>>1109126
My friend's dad spent 14 years in reeducation camp and all his friends got shot trying to eat rats.
Crazy shit. The USA really dropped the ball, we kept pussyfooting around trying to find the balance between BTFOing the commies, saving face at home, and preventing a chinese/soviet invasion. The terrain and morale were terrible too.
Ho Chi Minh was a sellout though, he was a national hero for BTFOing the french but there was the very real fear in the south of being re-colonized by chinks through gommunism.
>>1109094
I think you mean "without the Soviet nuclear deterrent"
>>1109050
In 1959 the few US in-country advisors were using local weapons.
>people actually think Vietnam was a military defeat
I hate the US as much as the next guy,but you can't deny that USA had enough power to genocide every songle vietnamese without even using nuclear weapons, the only thing making vietnam a defeat was public opinion.
>>1110317
Believe it or not, victory in warfare has a lot more to do with capturing and defending strategic points than just killing a bunch of guys.
>>1107596
Because it was only a failure if you buy the bullshit propaganda surrounding it
U.S. war aims were to stop the spread of communism in Asia.
They kind of met those goals, although there was a bit more communism leeching into neighboring countries after Vietnam.
The war also got China and the USSR into red hot competition, and China invaded Vietnam 7 years after we pulled out, scouring their reputation.
Now, maybe even better could have been done without the war. I'd say it's true. The war was also fought shittily.
But, Indonesia did't go commie, Thailand didn't go commie, the Philippines didn't go commie, Malaysia didn't go commie, etc.
When the war started those all seemed ready to collapse. So maybe the war bought time for them.
>>1110626
Laos and Cambodia became full on communists.
Indonesia and Malysia didn't matter because they hate commies and the USA (you niggers supported Israel). They were Third World Neutrals.
Chinkdom and Ivan were long at loggerheads before Vietnam war.
US War Aims in Vietnam did jackshit,
>>1107596
>looking at [the Vietnam War] objectively
are you literally retarded?
>they only fought to bail out the french
wat
>communism spreads to laos and cambodia, so how can the US be a superpower
how can a nation with over 20% of both the world's economy and military strength be a world power for allowing communism to spread to some parts of SE Asia
Take a break kid. Go outside, play, get some fresh air or somethin
>>1107933
Pretty much this. From what I've been told by Viets whose parents lived through the war, the main goal was to unify the country, and so be it if that had to be through communism. Now Vietnam has a more selective brand of communism, in which those in good with the government can own nice stuff and most others are left with very little.
>>1109245
So?
The M1 carbine was not the US infantry's standard rifle.
>>1107652
You don't have to kill a soldier to remove him from the fight permanently. In fact not killing American soldiers was probably the best thing the Vietcong could do because then they go home and act as a rallying point for anti-war factions.
Retard alert.
1. The US didn't use nukes or send over 15,000,000 troops and conduct a massive blitzkrieg invasion because it feared Russia would get involved.
2. The US pretty much only had "sweep and clear" orders. Not conquering territory in the sense of traditional warfare.
3. The Vietnamese had a jungle and underground tunnels as their home turf, which neutralized a lot of American tech like tanks and planes.
4. The Vietnamese had AK-47's which were superior to the M-16 in wet, jungle combat.
>>1107933
>mostly because ho chi minh was a based nationalist leader like Tito rather than a Soviet puppet like Kim il sung
You what? He supported the crushing of the Prague Spring by the USSR, toed the Comintern line on almost every issue of international importance and was a devout Communist
I don't know why people still fall for the "reasonable nationalist that only turned to the USSR because he was spurned by America" line
>>1112005
>4. The Vietnamese had AK-47's which were superior to the M-16 in wet, jungle combat.
No.
>>1107596
The Vietnamese used the time honored strategy of sending waves and waves of people at the enemy until they get irritated and you win. On a purely tactical level, the Vietnam War was much more a disaster for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it was for the USA. The reason why it was an embarrassment is because the war itself was pointless and stupid.
>>1107596
If the americans were like the Assyrians or something and conducted complete total war where anything goes, they'd win no question.
But that's not how the world works. As much as some don't like to believe it, there's a moral compontent to this. The reason they lost was because they lost support from the american public, not because they lost militarily. What an absolute shit thread OP.
>>1112595
I don't know, didn't the Assyrians have to suppress rebellions once a decade in every city they conquered?
>>1107596
On a military level, the Vietnamese had the advantage of being able, to some extent, to control where and when they could fight. Of course with the firepower the US forces could muster the Vietnamese casualties were pretty high, but as Ho Chi Minh said himself: "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." The communists had the home advantage, each soldier knows what he's fighting for (whether it's communism or a unified Vietnam) and is willing to die for it. Compare that with the mindset of the average American soldier in Vietnam, thousands of miles from home with public support crumbling around him. It's obvious who's going to give up first. This was only made worse by the fact that the US public were told they were winning until the images of the Tet Offensive burst onto their screens. It was the first war where the public was vividly aware of the brutality of the conflict. The second the US decides to draft middle class, liberal, anti-war college kids into their military is the second they've lost the war. Not only are the kids against it but their mothers too. They've seen the images of body bags being loaded onto helicopters in the news and now it's their turn? The untouchable middle class? How on Earth are they going to support a war like that?
>>1112611
The majority of American soldiers sent to Vietnam were volunteers.
Draftees were most often stationed to West Germany.
>>1112617
That's a good point, most were volunteers, but there was a very vocal minority who weren't. Even though most draftees wouldn't see action in Vietnam the very principle of drafting them meant the war lost massive amounts of public support.
>>1112029
little of one little of the other
I mean the guy made sure that China and Russia gave only the minimum aid throughout the war to make sure they didn't become another France/US.
though yeah I guess I am giving him too much credit.
>>1110626
I wonder how China lost in Vietnam. I mean it didn't have the "bleeding heart sympathies" or the "take over without actually conquering" setbacks that US and France had. Why were they repelled?
>>1107933
Imagine if Wilson had listened to Ho Chi Minh at Versailles.
>>1112656
Didn't the Chinese army get defeated in normal battles, not prolonged guerilla combat?
Well, to be honest the US never should have gone there to begin with. First off, like a lot of other anons said a big part of it was that the US had no clearly determined aims (the main reasons were to help the French and save Vietnam from spooky communisms), just a lot of worry about the retarded "domino theory". Apart from that, US command was dumb as hell, wanting to fight a war of attrition in a proxy war, in an area where the enemy used guerilla warfare effectively, in jungles where the US had poor knowledge of the terrain, in a nation where you couldn't be sure which Vietnamese were secretly against you. Further, the US military depended heavily on air support and strategic bombing, which is fuckall difficult when you can't see shit through the jungle. Enter Agent Orange. Things may have started turning around a bit had the US switched to a more appropriate strategy but instead the US populace got pissed about My Lai, Agent Orange, and getting their US fudge packed by little Asians. All this together, morale was bullshit.
It's honestly a little surprising it didn't go worse.
>>1113034
An addendum.
This shit is mainly why the US switched to a policy (until recently) of only attacking when there is no possible way to lose, especially places wide open for bombing campaigns.
The US won the Vietnam war
>>1113052
America's army was made to go against big armies
Small armies are either so small that either fighting them is overkill or so chaotic that you can't really find a victory condition
Like how is the War on terror going to end? death of all muslims? all middle-easterners? every terrorist ever? conquest of the region? the building of puppet govs that create more resentment and thus more terrorists? stable govs that due to popular demand will try to fuck over the west in every turn? giving in to what the terrorist want and stop exploiting their oil and remove all western influence? how is this gonna end?
>>1112694
Was it the relative inexperience of the Chinese army then?
A country with almost no real experience trying to invade someone who'd spent a couple decades figuring everything out the hard way?
>>1113079
The War on Terror mess is what (until recently) refers to. I agree with you.
>>1107596
>Americans wasted thousands of lives in a brutal conflict against a country that had nothing to do with them at the behest of France
>A country that would then turn around and spit on their efforts and mock them relentlessly
>Meanwhile half their country was desperately trying to convince their government to get them out of an unnecessary conflict and their media did everything in their power to confound the efforts of the US military
How the fuck could they have won? Even if you buy into the whole "Americans are baby-eating monsters" ideology they're not going to endlessly napalm the entire country, and by the time they pulled out Vietnamese civilian casualties had reached absurd levels and US political and cultural support for the war was non existent
>>1112656
Because China was big, not well supplied, trained, motivated, or equipped.
The same reason they lost the Korean War (and then were able to recover during the initial ceasefire, reform into a defensive posture and stalemate using superior numbers to overwhelm attackers with counterattacks from positions very hard to take from the front but easy to retake from the rear)
Once their initial steam ran out they faced poor logistics, questionable training, lack of strong motivation and were fighting a foe with better weaponry (Vietnam received the cream of the crop of Soviet weaponry, the Chinese did not and at this point China and the Soviets had a deep rift between them)
The Chinese did kill more Vietnamese than they lost, but unlike the US where it had a 7:1 k/d, the Chinese only had a 1.3/1 k/d. The fact is they really got their rears handed to them by a small, determined battle hardened force and were not winning much more than phyrric victories. The war quickly became not worth it.
>>1113776
Vietnam also utilized all the goodies that the Americans has left the South.
>>1107596
Why was the Vietnam Conflict an embarrassment Anon? South Vietnam was created as a state with a treaty to prove it, US military killed about a million Viets, and got away scott free from the area afterwards.
Doesn't seem like a lost especially since Vietnam is sucking up to the US.
>>1107656
In this post, two statements are ended with question marks.
>>1108379
They weren't a threat before, numbnuts. Nothing was accomplished.
>>1110317
And then you'd piss off China and/or the Soviets and start WW3, good plan.
>>1113825
A war has military objectives. The US failed theirs. North Vietnam achieved theirs. HOW does your mind magically turn this into a US victory?
>>1108429
>You need to kill an entire villaige to make sure an insurgency cant rise up in that area
Trotsky is that you?
>>1113092
Mao purged the shit out of the Army during the Cultural Revolution and had stellar generals like Peng Dehuai behind bars or farming away in some camp.
Guess what happens to the army.
>>1113079
>>death of all muslims?
Nah, death of several hundred million and mass-scale imposing of puppet governments upon the surviving muslim states.
>>giving in to what the terrorist want and stop exploiting their oil and remove all western influence?
This will never happen. Oil is too vital for energy security and our influence isn't something we can just shut off.
>>1107596
Congress.
>>1107639
Guerilla warfare wasn't effective, it amounted to fuck all, Vietcong was thoroughly crushed and vast majority of the war were massive air campaigns, not paranoid soldiers getting sniped by le spooky pajama men in the jungle. Stop getting your history from Oliver Stone movies.
Correct TEXT:
WHO WOULD WIN:
1. The entire Vietnamese People including 13 million people willing to sacrifice their life for the independence of their country and willing to overcome internal political division in the face of a foreign enemy.
2. A largely drafted and unwilling US military in combination with increasingly hostile public opinion and wavering hypocritical political leadership
>>1114199
>entire Vietnamese people
Stop with this memeshit, vast majority of land combat was conducted by the ARVN, not the Americans. And southern Viets hate the northern trash to this day, especially the diaspora.
>>1114212
Aparantly you have learned nothing.
Even anti-communist south vietnamese were joining the northern forces in mass in the light of the US violence and it's pandering to a cruel and corrupt regime.
13 Million North Vietnamese died and millions more were ready to face the modern US miltary with primitive weaponry.
>>1114219
The fact is that the majority of people who fought on the allied side were, unsurprisingly, Vietnamese.
At best it was a civil war and America decided to back and supply one side of the conflict. To this day I have no idea how that got spinned into "USA vs entire Vietnam", whether it was the arrogance of Americans overstating their role, or communist propaganda to give the war an anti-imperialist dimension. Either way it's wrong.
>>1114238
Is it though? seeing as how as soon as the 'aid' pulls out the north roles into the capitol unmolested, I find that assessment hard to believe.
>>1114212
Then why was the ARVN so useless then? The US military in vietnam was very capable, why then did the south vietnamese suck so bad at warring?
>>1114253
>>1114258
I was talking about ground troops mostly, yes the US air force was crucial for bullying the north into signing the peace treaty.
>ARVN was useless
This is frankly a meme, often reinforced by American movies. While it's true that they pretty much kind of gave up in 1975 since they were undersupplied and betrayed by the US, it was still them who fought the most of that war before the peace treaty.
>>1114277
>undersupplied and betrayed
That's a funny way of saying, 'now that we have a big superpower to fight for us we don't have to spend money on our army'.
>>1114238
You seem completely oblivious to the kind of regimes the US backed in South Vietnam nor of the CIA organised murderous coup.
US policy backfired so much that what started out as a civil war became an anti-imperialist war as more and anti-communist south vietnamese rather joined the north than be ruled by a hypocritical foreign power installing puppet regimes to it's own ends.
>>1108369
So the US didn't just fail, they killed a bunch of vietnamese peasants in the process. That's lovely then!
Also
>referring to something your army did as "we"
>>1114305
>So the US didn't just fail
Fail what? Vietnam was a military action with no set goals.
>killed a bunch of vietnamese peasants in the process
Correct.
>something your army did as "we"
Same faction.
>>1114295
Are you Vietnamese? I heavily doubt it.
>>1114312
Failed at stopping a vietnamese communist state.
>>1114316
True, but thoroughly destroyed their ability to be a threat.
>>1114290
Something wrong about supplying your allies? North was supplied by the entire Ostblok + China.
>>1114326
Congress didn't want to. Not surprising as congress is largely the reason Vietnam was the fuck-up we remember it as.
>>1114212
My wife's Vietnamese and I haven't heard a bad word about northerners from her or her family during the two years we've been together. Her grandfather was even in the ARVN (or ruff-puffs or something, I don't know the details). She hates the Chinese, though.
>>1114324
Are you mad? You think they were a threat before?
>>1108938
Fuck off Fascist
>>1108873
>working less, having no enemies
Those are not good things. Read Maistre.
>>1114394
They could have been.
>>1114418
Oh, you're trolling. 5/10.
>>1114420
I'm not, see N. Korea.
>>1114495
But Vietnam is not N. Korea. You realize Vietnam became what you tried to stop it from becoming? It would just have been a more prosperous version of it's current self.
>>1107634
US was willing to go to war with Vietnam because we thought it was an easy short fight.
>>1107596
The US won Vietnam, even though we failed to prevent the north from conquering the south.
Winning a war isn't about conquest, it's about getting the enemy to do what you want. And vietnam does what america wants, because if they don't then they can say goodbye to any protection from china.
Vietnam is a very complex and pointless war, where basically everyone got what they wanted in the end, except the south Vietnamese. The north united the nation, but the US was able to keep vietnam as an "ally".
>>1114826
>The US won Vietnam, even though we failed to prevent the north from conquering the south.
>Winning a war isn't about conquest, it's about getting the enemy to do what you want
>even though we failed to prevent the north from conquering the south
I can't believe there are people in this thread who are seriously claiming that the US won the vietnam war because they managed to effectively genocide a significant part of the enemy.
>>1114830
What we wanted wasn't preventing the south from being conquered, it was containing soviet and Chinese influence.
Veitnam didn't decide to join up with china or russia, and instead allies with america, which means the US accomplished it's goal.
Do you not understand basic cold war foreign policy goals? The US was all about containing the soviets. And we did that.
>>1108849
Is LBJ the worst president in U.S. history? At least the scummiest right?
>>1114857
>>1114826
This is pure fantasy though. Vietnam fell out with China due to reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the USA but remained a close ally of the USSR throughout the rest of the Cold War and still has good relations with Russia today.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/DG12Ag01.html
Vietnam and the USA get on fine these days and relations are getting better but I fail to see in what sense the USA and Vietnam have ever been 'allies'.
>>1114857
>What we wanted wasn't preventing the south from being conquered, it was containing soviet and Chinese influence.
Meanwhile, in the real world, in the president's own words:
>Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam, and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves -- only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way. We will do everything necessary to reach that objective. And we will do only what is absolutely necessary.
>>1114886
Perhaps allies isn't the best term.
It's simply easier than saying "and vietnam fell did not fall under the soviet or chinese sphere of influence, and due to the situation created by Chinese exansionisim in south east asia, Vietnam, like the rest of the ASEAN, often works with america as they both benefit from joint operations and displays of power in order to keep china in check as much as possible"
Typing that over and over again would cause my posts to get a bit to lengthy.
>>1107596
There is no military solution to that kind of situation.
Something the US didn't understand then, and still doesn't understand today, as they are repeating the process in the Middle East.
See, if you want to get people to side with your cause, or to stop doing something, unless you are prepared to kill ALL of the people you are trying to "liberate" or trying to change the behavior of, you can't achieve this through force, unless you do it in very short order and have the people's support.
The goal was to liberate Vietnam from communist influence, but by the middle of the war, we were creating more new communist factions than were there when we arrived, simply because we were killing and making so many people miserable in the effort. We later learned a good deal of the people shooting at us had no Viet Cong associations at all - they'd just had too many sons/daughters/brothers/sisters killed, and thus were out for blood. (Plus we brought to power various communist factions around the place, such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who before our efforts had almost zero public support, making things even worse.)
Blood cries out for blood, it's as simple as that. The Vietnamese, unlike the Americans, have to live in Vietnam, the Americans, on the other hand, eventually have to go home. Thus, inevitably, barring a total genocide (which still woulda been a failure to achieve the end goal anyways), the Vietnamese were going to win that war.
Same with the "War on Terror" - that's a war designed to never end. The more you fight it, the more it perpetuates itself. The US will never win the war, and ISIS is just the latest tip of a giant iceberg.
Unless, of course, the US finally somehow learns this lesson, but when the only tool you have is a Hammer.exe, every problem starts to look like a BSP.
>>1114905
>Perhaps allies isn't the best term.
Enemies, at least during the Cold War if not now would be the best term.
>It's simply easier than saying "and vietnam fell did not fall under the soviet or chinese sphere of influence,
Except they did fall under the Soviet and Chinese sphere of influence and while they fell out with China they remained under the Soviet sphere of influence for the rest of the Cold War.
And no minor modern co-operation with the USA has any basis in anything the USA achieved in the Vietnam War.
I'm sorry but you are simply making things up.
>>1114924
>if not now
Not even close to true.
Veitnam is one of the most pro-american countries in south east asia.
We have a variety of agreements with vietnam, and are generally on rather good terms with them.
To what extent the vietnam war influenced this is up for debate, but to even suggest that we are currently enemies is completely untrue.
>>1107596
Dan Rather
John Kerry
Hanoi Jane Fonda
My Lai "massacre"
Massive communist infiltration into US media and government.
Their willingness to lose 3,500,000 gooks.
>>1114963
>Not even close to true.
It's entirely true.
The USSR had close military and economic ties with Vietnam throughout the entire Cold War.
They even had a large military base there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_Ranh_Bay
>>1114968
Even if the American people had completely backed that war for another 100 years, they never would have won it. It ended because, short of killing all the Vietnamese, there was no way to win it, and doing that probably woulda cost us the cold war as well. There was simply no way to achieve that goal militarily, once it started to drag on.
Military actions are great for stopping a government from a specific action, or for ending a government's ability to wage war. They however, are absolutely useless for changing the will of an entire people, and when used in that fashion haphazardly, have a habit spreading wider and wider of the very thinking you're trying to put an end to.
You can't beat an ideal with bombs.
>>1107652
VC would smear human shit onto the end of bamboo to infect
>>1107596
But the u.s won by bodycount & thats how it fights its wars
Seriously rubber was the target not commies
I'm not sure if it was already mentioned but we technically did win the war with the Paris Peace Accord.
We got the NVA to finally sit down and work out a peace agreement, now of course you'd be stupid to think that the NVA would honor this agreement so we also agreed to support South Vietnam like we did South Korea in case the NVA got bold again.
Now this is where I'm iffy on the subject, when the NVA began to steamroll through South Vietnam and pretty much called out the US bluff, we didn't hold our end of the deal with the South Vietnamese.
Congress blocked the full support that Nixon had agreed to provide and ended up getting only less the half of what was promised, the South Vietnamese gov't even went and called the US out over this.
If I'm wrong about anything please let me know, I'm still trying to learn as much as I can about the latter years of the Vietnam War
>>1107656
But you wont
>>1115273
>We got the NVA to finally sit down and work out a peace agreement
You mean the NVA forced you to sit down and 'negotiate' a face saving surrender.
>We won Vietnam!
Why does this meme persist?
>>1115000
I was talking about modern day, not back then.
>>1115285
>NVA
>forcing America
lol
>>1115295
Irrelevant and nothing to do with any outcome of the Vietnam War.
>>1110588
Absolutely,i am not saying US won,but they didn't lose because of their army being incompetent(not only)
>>1110317
If the goal was to genocide everyone in Vietnam, sure, yeah, we coulda won, no problem.
Thankfully, not every war is a total war, and in most instances, you don't win your objective simply killing more of the enemy than they kill of you.
I say thankfully, for were it otherwise, ANY time a stronger nation wanted something of a weaker one, we'd have a war.
But the truth is, for a lot of things, war just doesn't work. Putting down a popular movement, is one of those things. That was the goal, and we used the wrong tool for the job. We just ended up making it more popular than ever.
You can jam a phillips screwdriver into a wedge screw all ya want. Doesn't matter how big and expensive or near to perfection the screwdriver is, or how much strength you put behind it - all you're going to do is strip the screw's head. ...and you ain't ever gonna get it out, even with the right tool, after you try that bonehead move.
>>1111304
>Take a break kid. Go outside, play, get some fresh air or somethin
Under rated post evr
The key to US defeat in Vietnam was a misunderstanding on the highest strategic level that they where fighting communism. The essential motivation for the Viet Mihn was nationalism. Subsequent conflicts with China have only reinforced this distinction.
>>1107880
Everyone knows what the victory conditions were. They just dont want to admit it since it makes the US look bad in regards.
To install a puppet government that favors the US by any means necessary. Aka war, corruption, bribery, etc.
>>1116762
We had that going before the war even started.
Just, couldn't keep it alive by killing everyone at random. That, understandably, made the opposition rather popular.
>>1116686
As I recall, Minh originally reached out to the US for help but got no answer, so he reached out to the Soviets instead. He was willing to join the camp of whoever supported his nationalistic war of liberation.
>>1116878
Minh also had the support of OSS officers embedded in Vietnam during the war against the Japanese, and if I recall, they spoke very highly of him.
>They only fought to bail out the french who themselves were completely incompetent as well. The mission was to protect the french colonies in "Indochina" and to stop the spread of communism.
France left and gave Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam their independence in 1954. The American Vietnam war started in 1964, and obviously had nothing to do with "bailing out the French" who were long gone.
How the fuck am I the first to point this out after over 150 posts? What a useless board.
>>1117065
The Americans did give plenty of material assistance to the French during the first Indochina war, going so far as to airdrop supplies over the French encampments in Dien Bien Phu.
>>1117081
And that still has nothing to do with the American war 10 years later.
BTW the half-hearted American logistical support was to make up for the Roosevelt administration arming and supporting the Viet Minh in the first place.
>>1117092
>half hearted
Not really.
>>1114826
This meme again.
Vietnam has some vague pro US policy when concerning its surroundings but otherwise does not give a fuck about US and would rather stay out of US influence if it had a choice.
>>1114010
When the US left Vietnam, South Vietnam was anti-communists state thanks to the treaty signed.
Only years after the US finished its business was South Vietnam invaded by North Vietnam.
How is this not a US victory? US won and left, several years later S.Vietnam failed to keep itself as an independent state.
>>1108374
The fact that the U.S won every major engagement against the NVA is true. It is also irrelevant.
>>1114558
which it was.
We killed them at a 50:1 ratio, they were running out of men and were reduced to women and children being conscripted,
We were literally about to commit genocide had we given it a few more years.
Their army was down and out with weeks, their citizenry, took a bit longer.
>>1107596
Didn't have any defined victory conditions.
>>1115800
Okay but we dealt enough damage that if we "lost" there sure as fuck wasn't any retaliation. Is it a win if thier nation is a shell of what it used to be?
>>1117292
Irrelevant to what? The outcome of the war? Really?
The USA gave up before the North Vietnamese ran out of manpower
>>1114495
>north korea
>a threat
If they ever so much as look at their red button we can bomb them to fucking hell. They're under control.
>>1107933
>This
Nationalism is a deadly tool.
>>1107620
Yes, in a sports match.
But not for 14 years of war.
People like to forget that Ho Chi Minh lived in Boston and Harlem during his younger years and was a real Ameriboo. He simply wanted to see an independent Vietnam, free to follow its own path. The idiotic Americans translated this as "muh gommunism" and forced Ho Chi Minh to accept aid form the Soviets and the Chinese (who he definitely did not like).
Also people like to forget when the US supported Pol Pot right after the war and the NVA invaded Cambodia and ended the genocide.
>>1117630
This kills the globalist.
>>1117498
>We killed them at a 50:1 ratio
This isn't CoD
>they were running out of men and were reduced to women and children being conscripted,
In the Viet Cong's case, yes. In the NVA's case, it was just getting started.
>>1117733
>le Uncle Ho was not a gommunist meme
Stop it.
>>1117740
>you have to be pegged by a KGB agent while yelling "STALIN YES!" in order to be a communist
He was a communist like Tito and/or Hoxha.
>>1107596
Vietnam was also getting help from two superpowers; China and the Soviet Union. Despite this, communist forces never managed to break through the American occupied territories in the South and take it over. Attacks against those territories were constantly repelled. They only took over the South after the peace treaty was signed and the Americans left.
The loss had to do more with the fact that South Vietnam's government was so weak and that it had very little support from the Vietnamese public. Couple that with the Chinese and Soviet support of communist forces in Vietnam, the fall of the South was inevitable.
The only way the US could've won Vietnam was to invade the North and take it over, but you couldn't do that without risking another war with the Chinese or the Soviet Union.
>>1114872
up there with Wilson and FDR.
>>1107596
there are mcdonalds in vietnam. vietnamese tourists come to disneyland
we won
>>1117699
Naw man, you're looking at it wrong.
Imagine a really good team, normally plays well and has won a few championships, yeah?
Then they start getting younger, new guys on their roster.
They play terribly for a season and no one lets them live it down.
That's Vietnam.
America.
post vietnam pictures
>>1118021
>>1118027
>>1118032
>>1118041
>>1118043
>tfw you will never napalm the jungle
>>1118045
>>1118052
>>1118050
;_;
>>1118055
>>1118056
[ccr intensifies]
>>1118074
>>1118077
>>1118078
>>1118079
>>1118086
is anyone here? should i keep going?
>>1107671
Anybody that calls China a superpower lacks a useful definition of superpower.
>>1118093
yeah. thanks for posting
>>1118126
ight i'll be around for another 20 mins
>>1118135
>>1118139
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>>1118146
>>1118149
>>1118156
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>>1118179
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>>1118188
>>1118193
last one, night /his/
>>1117541
There never was expected to be any retaliation from Vietnam itself, win or lose. That was strictly a one-way war. All the damage we took from it, both in economic loss, kids lost, loss of collective morale, cultural cohesion, public trust, and political trust, we essentially did to ourselves. Vietnam was always powerless to do anything to retaliate, save to say "Fuck off, we red now.", and after they "won", that's the only thing they did.
The consequences of fighting that war to the US were far grander than the consequences of not fighting it could have ever been. More importantly, if we'd gone about it through other means, we would have been much more likely to achieve our objective there at a lost less cost from every angle. It was a classic example of the military being used to solve a problem that it simply could never hope to solve, regardless of how well it performed.
>Sign peace treaty
>Start pulling out
>commies overrun the south as soon as american military leave
Murricans no longer had stakes there
the benefits didn't compensate for the losses
nobody really knew who the fuck ho chin minh was
they thought they were heading to another korea
>>1107957
That was the vietcong, which was essentially north cannon fodder
>>1117829
Americans drink tea and go on holiday to london. Is america still a colony then?
South Vietnam lost it.
When the US pulled out, the territory the NVA controlled was very little.
It was a morale boost for the North and a morale drain for the South. The North had to conquer a lot of territory and did it very quickly.
>>1119320
He *kinda* has a point in that Vietnam is pretty westernized now - more a result of winning the cold war than the Vietnam war, and an incredible capacity for forgiveness on behalf of the Vietnamese. Suffice to say, nothing of the sort happened until well after the war.
But that war didn't have to happen to win the overall culture war. If anything, it was a major setback to that final, larger goal.
>>1117829
germany is a prosperous state and gets to say what most of europe does. german people walk around moscow
germans won ww2
>>1107596
GOMMUNIST LIES
WE
WUZ
VICTORIOUS
MUH POLITICAL RETREAT
>>1107866
Implying France is a superpower.
If the EU was a cohesive state it would be a superpower economically, (if you trimmed the eastern and Balkans fat).... Actually maybe the EU should just be france, benelux, scandinavia, germany, and the UK. Not surprising that all the successful countries are Germanic.
>>1107856
One of the reasons was that Korea has historically been seen as the dagger to the heart of Japan, which was the USA's base of operations in containing Communism in the Far East.
>>1107596
They had rubber we wanted it
>to protect french colonies
no, we wanted them for ourselves, that's why we psuedo-invaded only after france pulled out depsite them asking repeatedly for help.
Of course the U.S couldn't win,
>The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
>The conventional army loses if it does not win.
>>1114166
>Vietcong was thoroughly crushed and vast majority of the war were massive air campaigns
If this is "thoroughly crushed" I'd hate to see "at full strength"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War#United_States_aircraft
>>1117739
To paraphrase Colonel Kilgore, we "bombed them to the Stone Age". We dropped millions of tons of explosives, incendiary, and chemical weapons over North Vietnam. We pretty much destroyed the North's infrastructure and killed untold thousands. If they were "just getting started", I don't even want to know how they were going to end it.
>>1118107
China was a superpower then, as it is now. It was the greatest threat to American dominance in East Asia. They even fought the poo in the loos for a time and basically fucked over the Tibetans for strategic defense purposes and to secure the source of nearly half of Asia's rivers.
>>1107596
Technically the north Vietnamese didn't win a military victory over America so much as America gave up due to the fight being a expensive unproductive effort.
Of course the same could be said about America's victory in the revolution from Britain and in the war of 1812 so credit where credit is due.
In the long run though the cold war ended and north and south reunited and are no longer communist so I guess you could say the west lost the battle but won the war even though that probably had more to do with the inherent instability of communism rather than any real action by the west.
>Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?
Because we are still the single strongest global military and economic power on the map, this part hasn't really changed since the ending of ww2.
>>1107670
I know right? that's totally a SKS in that picture!
>>1114872
>Is LBJ the worst president in U.S. history?
Nope that would be FDR
>Cripple
>Steals everyone's gold
>Drags america into other countries problems
>Manipulates wartime situations to stay in office too long
>Imprisons American citizens in interment camps
Fuck that half man piece of shit.
>>1120667
>china was a superpower then
"no"
>>1119450
Its not really forgiveness on the behalf of the Vietnamese, but rather the Viet's rather dim view of China.
>>1107620
What a bad analogy
>>1107880
Actually....
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/05/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-us-never-lost-major-battle-vietn/
The media ruined everything and hippies think they did something to change Nixon's mind. Imagine that. Nixon caring about a hippie's opinions on the theatre of war.
>>1108362
MUH KDR HURDUREUDER
>>1108433
I don't know. Maybe the fact none of our objectives were accomplished, the ensuing decade was extremely politically divisive because of the loss, and we had stagflation because of the debt incurred?
>>1110317
Enjoy WW3
>>1110626
Vietnamese hated China the whole time, but the Commies were friends until the final Sino-Soviet split in 1966.
Vietnam was a Soviet puppet state through the 80's.
>>1112656
In 1979 Deng Xiapoing was rising in power, but he was opposed by the Maoist Gang of Four and the Maoist generals in the PLA.
So what did he do to fix that?
Entice the PLA to attack Vietnam. Assign the Maoist generals to it. Then make sure to only send a third of the required forces and material.
It was a political game to discredit the Maoist generals and the Gang of Four.
Also, to this day the Chinese own Vietnamese territory. Hard to say the Chinese lost as bad as America.
>>1113776
>same reason they lost the Korean war
Umm?
>>1113825
>got away scot free
Umm?
>>1114199
>entire vietnamese people
>largely drafted American army
Is /his/ really this shit?
>>1121032
>>Also, to this day the Chinese own Vietnamese territory
A very, very small slice of it after doing much worse against the vietnamese then the US did. That invasion is also part of the reason why vietnam is so willing to let bygones be bygones with the USA.
>>1114312
>Vietnam was a military action with no set goals.
....
>>1114826
>The US won Vietnam, even though we failed to prevent the north from conquering the south.
(You)
>>1114905
>and vietnam fell did not fall under the soviet or chinese sphere of influence,
???
Are there only 13 year olds on /his/?
>>1114963
>Veitnam is one of the most pro-american countries in south east asia.
You think what the people think matters in Vietnam?
>We have a variety of agreements with vietnam, and are generally on rather good terms with them.
No we do not. No we are not.
>>1115295
Then what the fuck was your point about us winning the Vietnam war?
Did you think our foreign policy people were so smart they though 50 years into the future?
>>1116686
HCM was a full-blown Communist and this meme that he was simply a nationalist is retarded and needs to end.
>>1116878
No he did not. Not in the sense you are saying.
Hindsight is 20/20
>>1121039
>oh shitu, american pig dogs have invaded best Korea and kickad the shittu out of it
>rets invade
>oh shitu, we steamrolling these white piggus, rets get worst korea too
>oh shittu shitu shitu ree fucked up they're fucking us sirry we have no pranes or suppries
>wats dat ceasefire yes white devir ree sign ceasefire much peace and prosperity
>okay ree resuppried our army now you die again pig dogus fuk peace
>oh fuk dis shitu ree can't beat dem at reast they can't beat us either
China overextended heavily in trying to take Sourth Korea as well and were pushed back almost as hard as they initially pushed NATO back. They were on the brink of collapse when the Soviets put forth a ceasefire and deescalation plea (and the Chinese, who were only going to honor it so long as it took to regroup their shattered armies and solidify supply lines of course accepted) and the US President took the bait and said sure.
Same thing happened in Vietnam. China steamrolled in, then shortly after their poor weaponry, logistics and overall organization bit them in the ass. And this time there was no ceasefire for them to salvage the situation so they just got the hell out of dodge and decided to just forget Vietnam ever happened and never talk about how bad of an idea it was.
>>1117092
>half hearted
Bait
>>1117163
>The agreement guaranteed the territorial integrity of Vietnam and, like the Geneva Conference of 1954, called for national elections in the North and South. The Paris Peace Accords stipulated a sixty-day period for the total withdrawal of U.S. forces. "This article", noted Peter Church, "proved… to be the only one of the Paris Agreements which was fully carried out."[255]
