Vietnam, a different takedr_dgoJune 16 2009, 07:36:36 UTC
There is another view of that war that I avoided being drafted into by virtue of bad eyesight. That is that it was one of many battles in what Jerry Pournelle refers to as the 70 year War. We did lose the war, mostly because of the propaganda, because militarily we had defeated the Viet Cong, and the North at least once. The Soviet's treasury was drained providing all the material that we destroyed, including more tanks than Germany ever possessed in WWII. Many mistakes were made on a strategic level, including as you state, the use of draftees to fight a long and drawn out war. The lies to the press did not help any either. But when the Democratic Congress cut off funding to the South Vietnamese army, the war was lost. Even though at that time most of the fighting was being done by the South (with air support from the US
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Re: Vietnam, a different takefpbJune 16 2009, 09:43:13 UTC
Me: The core of the power of the West - and the ultimate reason why the Soviets, in spite of winning nearly every battle of the Cold War, eventually lost the war - was the West's overwhelming industrial and financial superiority. You:Another way that the Soviets lost the 70 year War was that we could (and did) outspend them on military items and research.No difference, is there? The Soviet Union beat and battered itself to death against a marble wall of wealth that it never managed to dent. Even the vicious economic crisis of the seventies did not reduce the imbalance. The only reason why the Soviet Union was a great power in the first place was that practically all her available resources of power were focused on external aggression, subversion and advance; whereas the rich societies of the West regarded foreign policy as only one of many concerns, and aggressive expansion for its own sake as immoral "imperialism". The enormous difference in size between the Western and Eastern undercover apparati, for instance, meant that on a
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Re: Vietnam, a different takefpbJune 16 2009, 16:28:42 UTC
Ah, but I am not speaking of the US, I am speaking of the Western alliance, formal and informal, and to some extent including even supposedly neutral countries such as Sweden, Ireland and Austria. The truth is that if you sum western Europe, north America, and Japan and the Asia-Pacific rim including Australia and New Zealand, in about 1980, you get power and wealth simply beyond Soviet reach.
Re: Vietnam, a different takefpbJune 16 2009, 10:55:41 UTC
But I think you should beware of the self-satisfaction on your side. If your spies were so efficient at locating Soviet infiltrators, how come we are still discovering Aldriches and Myerses years after the cold war has been over?
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You:Another way that the Soviets lost the 70 year War was that we could (and did) outspend them on military items and research.No difference, is there? The Soviet Union beat and battered itself to death against a marble wall of wealth that it never managed to dent. Even the vicious economic crisis of the seventies did not reduce the imbalance. The only reason why the Soviet Union was a great power in the first place was that practically all her available resources of power were focused on external aggression, subversion and advance; whereas the rich societies of the West regarded foreign policy as only one of many concerns, and aggressive expansion for its own sake as immoral "imperialism". The enormous difference in size between the Western and Eastern undercover apparati, for instance, meant that on a ( ... )
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