We hold no ground we "won", and seldom even did so at the time; other than a few planeloads of refugees, we swayed no people to our cause, our operational art was, in fact, to consistently put us in the worst position in every battle, and use the troops at every level as bait for firepower, there was no strategy except to keep killing, there was no battle victory to leverage, and our policies left our treasury bankrupt, our military gutted and hollow, our allies indifferent or aghast at our stupidity and eventual abandonment of our allies there, and our adversaries emboldened for the next 15 years.Vonz90 wrote: In the end, the job of tactics is to win battles, the of operations is to put yourself in a favorable position in battles, the job of strategy is to use victory in battle to advance a favorable peace and the job of policy is to put youself in an overall favorable stratigic situation.
Which battle did we win? Which piece of ground did we prevail upon, and never have to fight for afterwards? You can't claim a victory in the third inning. It really is that simple.Simply put, if you are not getting defeated on the battlefield, looking for tactical/operational fixes for your strategic defeats is a waste of time. That does not mean that you can't get better in those areas.
Yeah, and Year 101 really kicked their asses. It's that it couldn't be done once there were two teams on the field, especially if one side was helpfully the French.The French had a relatively easy time taking over Indochina and ruling it for about 100 years, so it is not that it couldn't be done.
Point to that idea.So your idea that it was an impossible task from the getgo is off.
I don't recall ever saying it wasn't possible. I said it was beyond criminally retarded to squander blood and treasure, our national soul, and international reputation to make a half-assed attempt.
It would have been far more humane, if it was so important to join battle, to simply nuke Hanoi once, and salt the surrounding fields. Then build a hedge of troops around SVN, and give them a decade of relative peace to set about forming a functional country, which they never had. It's virtually exactly what we accomplished in Korea, where infiltrating across the Yellow Sea was somewhat less feasible than down the ho Chi Minh Trail.
Which has as much to do with anything I said as the number of pounds of rattan an elephant can carry over a silk thread to build a jetpack powered by unicorn farts.Insurgencies are not easy to fight and especially for democracies where you have to go through at least two administration (a typical ensurgency takes at least ten years to win). We need to keep a clear head about examining these things because we are going to have to keep doing them. Just throwing your hands up and saying everything is pointless is not going fix anything.
It's pointless when you set out to kill your troops and waste your resources in pursuit of fuck-all-if-anyone-knows, which countless worthies present from Day One to The End have affirmed was our overall mission.
It's bad enough to be crazy old Don Quixote, tilting at windmills from delusions of grandeur. But to blindfoild yourself first, and trample the farmers' crops and children during your charge is beyond simple lunacy, it's criminal insanity.
And incidentally, our record of building stable nation-states from scratch is .000, from 1800-yesterday, inclusive.
Other people have to build their countries, when they're ready, and you can no more pull-start countries than a poulterer can force-breed mature chickens by squeezing them out of the eggs before they hatch. The best, indeed only thing, we can and should do, is send support when we identify someone whose aims align with our own, and try and give them enough support to survive and thrive. But we can't fight their wars for them unless we're prepared to stay forever, which is still an ultimate failure. As we should have learned from Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Korea, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and any number of other places we've tried it and largely failed to do anything that lasts unless the country was ready for it entirely apart from our wishes or efforts.
Our model should be Libya 1800s, or 1983. Go in, f*** up whoever's pissing us off, tell them knock it off, and GTFO. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The third time, nuke the capital, burn the crops, salt the fields, slaughter the livestock, and drive the refugees to the borders of the land, and let them try again in a generation or two, from scratch. In the meantime, we kill no one, especially our own troops, and enjoy 50-80 years of peace, while other nations learn not to poke the bear unless you want to become an ass sandwich for it. As Niccolo Machiavelli pointed out 500 years ago, it's better to be feared than loved.
Thus the problem with Vietnam wasn't that 58,000+ casualties was too much of a futile sacrifice on the altar of national stupidity. It's that even 1 was.
