Nonetheless, America went into Vietnam as though it were fighting World War Two - or rather, its somewhat altered memories of World War Two. She fought as if just piling resources upon resources and men upon men could guarantee victory.
Spot-on. We threw in additional material resources when what we needed was a different grand strategyThere were two strategies, one offensive and one defensive, which might have won the war. Both would have required diplomatic changes. Neither were tried
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This was probably because we saw that it would have made good Communist propaganda It did anyway. I don't know if you are old enough to remember; I am - just about - and I can tell you that the news we heard left the impression that Germany and Japan had had it light as compared with Vietnam. Plus, there was the special nastiness of napalm and Agent Orange. Since the Soviets were getting their poundsworth of propaganda anyway, you might as well have gone in hard.
The problem with a crusading spirit is that it needs crusading results.As I said, the people of the US, if not their commanders, deserve congratulations for managing to keep up their fighting spirit for years in spite of increasingly frustrating circumstances. And perhaps, if someone had understood the kind of war that was coming upon them, and said clearly: "My fellow citizens, we are fighting a war that will last long, and our goal is simply to keep going as long as it takes", they might have gone on even longer. However, what the authorities did was to keep holding
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This was probably because we saw that it would have made good Communist propaganda ...
It did anyway. I don't know if you are old enough to remember; I am - just about - and I can tell you that the news we heard left the impression that Germany and Japan had had it light as compared with Vietnam. Plus, there was the special nastiness of napalm and Agent Orange. Since the Soviets were getting their poundsworth of propaganda anyway, you might as well have gone in hard.
Yes, I know. And in fact napalm (and other incendiaries) were used during World War II as well. It's just that in World War II the international media weren't focusing on this.
And the media has stuck with that template. Wars in which extreme care is taken to avoid bombing civilians, such as the Iraq campaign of 2003-09, are described as "America bombing civilians." Sometimes, through an excess of enthusiasm, as "saturation" or "carpet"-bombing of civilians, as if these adjectives were merely amplifiers and did not have specific military meanings.
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: interesting, but.....fellmamaJune 16 2009, 15:54:52 UTC
4--The US had begun pumping money and military advisors into Vietnam by the early 50s. Regardless, it's rather disingenuous to claim that "most of the vietnamese fighting weren't concerned with the international aspects"; how many soldiers in any war wholly understand the politics and diplomacy behind it?
Re: interesting, but.....fpbJune 16 2009, 14:47:40 UTC
7 - By the same token, the Italian cops who have been at war with the Mafia for a century should feel disheartened that however many people they jail or bury, the Mafia replicates itself. The point with evil is to fight it, not to indulge in dreams of glory. The threat of the Axis countries to America was real; that the Nazis mismanaged the immense resources placed at their disposal by the conquest of continental Europe (Nazi and Allied systems of war supply and industry are usefully compared in a chapter of Richard Overy's Why The Allies Won does not mean that, had they been used with the discipline and simplification that Speer only imposed in 1944, they would not have proved superior to the Allies. The total of Europe's industrial and agricultural potential, especially including the Russian areas conquered in the first year of fighting, was superior to that of the Allies. And it follows that while the idea that the Axis could threaten America seemed chimerical to those who just know the result, it was by no means chimerical at
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One problem with our war in Vietnam was that the people in charge had learned the wrong lessons from World War II and Korea.
From WWII, they had got the idea that "stalwart citizen-soldiers can win anything," even though WWII and Vietnam couldn't have been more different situations. Many of the men who were reluctant soldiers, or who resisted the draft or fled the country rather than be drafted, in Vietnam would have volunteered happily to fight in a war analogous to WWII.
And they thought that since a "demilitarized zone" across Korea had kept the peace between North and South Korea (more or less) since 1953, the same idea would work in Vietnam. The difference is that while Vietnam is long and narrow, it is not a peninsula, and the communists were quite well willing to go around the end of the DMZ.
In his book Soldier, Anthony Herbert, a "mustang" officer (one who started out as an enlisted man and worked his way up to colonel) says that another problem in Vietnam was that the men in charge were mostly men who had started
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Spot-on. We threw in additional material resources when what we needed was a different grand strategyThere were two strategies, one offensive and one defensive, which might have won the war. Both would have required diplomatic changes. Neither were tried ( ... )
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It did anyway. I don't know if you are old enough to remember; I am - just about - and I can tell you that the news we heard left the impression that Germany and Japan had had it light as compared with Vietnam. Plus, there was the special nastiness of napalm and Agent Orange. Since the Soviets were getting their poundsworth of propaganda anyway, you might as well have gone in hard.
The problem with a crusading spirit is that it needs crusading results.As I said, the people of the US, if not their commanders, deserve congratulations for managing to keep up their fighting spirit for years in spite of increasingly frustrating circumstances. And perhaps, if someone had understood the kind of war that was coming upon them, and said clearly: "My fellow citizens, we are fighting a war that will last long, and our goal is simply to keep going as long as it takes", they might have gone on even longer. However, what the authorities did was to keep holding ( ... )
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It did anyway. I don't know if you are old enough to remember; I am - just about - and I can tell you that the news we heard left the impression that Germany and Japan had had it light as compared with Vietnam. Plus, there was the special nastiness of napalm and Agent Orange. Since the Soviets were getting their poundsworth of propaganda anyway, you might as well have gone in hard.
Yes, I know. And in fact napalm (and other incendiaries) were used during World War II as well. It's just that in World War II the international media weren't focusing on this.
And the media has stuck with that template. Wars in which extreme care is taken to avoid bombing civilians, such as the Iraq campaign of 2003-09, are described as "America bombing civilians." Sometimes, through an excess of enthusiasm, as "saturation" or "carpet"-bombing of civilians, as if these adjectives were merely amplifiers and did not have specific military meanings.
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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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From WWII, they had got the idea that "stalwart citizen-soldiers can win anything," even though WWII and Vietnam couldn't have been more different situations. Many of the men who were reluctant soldiers, or who resisted the draft or fled the country rather than be drafted, in Vietnam would have volunteered happily to fight in a war analogous to WWII.
And they thought that since a "demilitarized zone" across Korea had kept the peace between North and South Korea (more or less) since 1953, the same idea would work in Vietnam. The difference is that while Vietnam is long and narrow, it is not a peninsula, and the communists were quite well willing to go around the end of the DMZ.
In his book Soldier, Anthony Herbert, a "mustang" officer (one who started out as an enlisted man and worked his way up to colonel) says that another problem in Vietnam was that the men in charge were mostly men who had started ( ... )
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