Warning

 

Close

Confirm Action

Are you sure you wish to do this?

Confirm Cancel
BCM
User Panel

Arrow Left Previous Page
Page / 3
Posted: 11/29/2011 5:19:47 PM EDT
Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.)  Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed?  Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure?  Could an invasion of the north have worked?  How would you keep China or the USSR out?  Was there even enough troops available?

Discuss....
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:23:42 PM EDT
[#1]
We won every battle, in spite of the administration coming up with ever newer and better ways to ensure we didn't. Any time we attempt nation building we always get a corrupt puppet govt. We should have never went to Vietnam but once we decided it should have been all or nothing.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:23:54 PM EDT
[#2]
There is not a single foe on the planet that could not be defeated by United States Military.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:25:06 PM EDT
[#3]
We won the war.

Lost the peace.

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:26:19 PM EDT
[#4]
Quoted:
We won the war.

Lost the peace.

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile


This
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:26:48 PM EDT
[#5]
militarily?  yes.



politically?  unlikely.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:27:22 PM EDT
[#6]
If we had actually bombed real targets in North Vietnam for a month we would have. I have heard stories of dozens of missions to bomb the same bombed out bridge over and over.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:27:23 PM EDT
[#7]
B-52s, dams around Hanoi... Drown the commie rats!
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:27:37 PM EDT
[#8]
Quoted:
Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.)  Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed?  Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure?  Could an invasion of the north have worked?  How would you keep China or the USSR out?  Was there even enough troops available?

Discuss....


The North never could have built up an invasion force, and never would have succeeded with the one they did out together, with only the slightest bit of assistance from us.  We left that place vulnerable, and doomed it to invasion.  Invading the north?  That is a whole different ball of wax.

The government there was no more or less corrupt than plenty others - from Greece to South Korea to Japan to Chile to Columbia, but with the establishment of market systems and institutions and the necessary freedoms required for them to work properly, we have a pretty good track record.  A much, much better track record than those other guys with the beards and the red flags and the green fatigues and what not.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:28:20 PM EDT
[#9]
We did.

We could have won it a lot sooner.

Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:29:33 PM EDT
[#10]
Depends what you mean by "winning."

Let's break that up into two parts.

FIRST QUESTION:

Could the South have successfully resisted communist aggression and infiltration from the North?

I believe the answer to that is "yes," IF the right conditions had been created in the South.

Land reform, and giving farmers a stake of ownership in the land they worked, was moving things in the right direction in terms of fostering greater anti-communist sentiment among the poor, but unfortunatelly the reforms were not given enough time to work (which is tragic).

SECOND QUESTION:

Could the United States have invaded North Vietnam and effected "regime change" there?

That gets much more complicated.

A better question might be: "Could the U.S. have won a war against China?"  Because invading North Vietnam would very likely have brought that about.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:30:13 PM EDT
[#11]
Yes.


The politicians hamstrung our military.  

We have not fought a total war since WWII.  That is not the fault of the military, but of the scum in Washington.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:32:59 PM EDT
[#12]
Not with those damned M16s that kept getting jammed up at the worst times.




























Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:34:53 PM EDT
[#13]
Stop the politicians from micromanaging things, let commanders take and hold territory, prevent the Dems from pulling the rug out from under the South Vietnamese government . . . sure, why not?
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:35:11 PM EDT
[#14]
It was probably doomed from the moment we helped france attempt to retake 'their' colony after WWII.
A lot of vietnamese were treated very badly by the french, and being fucked over by foreigners tends to live long in peoples memory (just look at a civil war war of northern aggression thread here).
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:35:57 PM EDT
[#15]
Wow lots of info to digest. Without answering every question you asked, because it would be more like a history report, I will say this. This subject is one of the reasons I joined the Army, I just have so much respect not only for all veterans but I especially have a soft spot for Vietnam vets.

We were within two weeks of a full North Vietnam surrender shortly after LBJ ordered operation linebacker then operation linebacker II. That was the first real cross border carpet bombing by our B52's. They flattened the shit out of those commie bastards infrastructure  then hit em again because like the Japanese in WWII didn't get the message the first time. If we had only continued the bombing of the north history would be much different and 56K+ of our men would not have died in vein.

Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:39:06 PM EDT
[#16]
Quoted:
There is not a single foe on the planet that could not be defeated by United States Military.


Damn right.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:41:45 PM EDT
[#17]
If we wanted to win the war it would have been fought in North Vietnam instead of South Vietnam.    If Ho Chi Minh had been concerned with  Hanoi being taken by the Big Red One and The 3rd Mar Div  the south woud have not been so important to him.....  Limited war is a losing proposition every time.  

Think Korea after the  Inchon landing before the Chinese entered the fight.

Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:42:22 PM EDT
[#18]
Not with the administration in charge at the time.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:43:12 PM EDT
[#19]
LBJ was an idiot.  Of course he was a liberal democrat, so that pretty much explains everything, but he squandered the whole fucking effort.  He tried to micro-manage certain aspects of the war like the bombing campaign in NV (Rolling Thunder), but he just interfered with getting the job done.  

I remember Klinton and his Chief of Staff George Stephanopolus trying to do the same thing in the former Yugoslavia and asking myself "have these radical twits not learned anything?"  Yea, I hate that fucker too.

Fuck LBJ.  What a fucking Douchbag.  He lost the war because he was timid as the CiC during the conduct of the war.  Nixon shows up, starts "Linebacker" I and II, and the little bastards up North suddenly have a change of heart.  Imagine that (and I don't even like Nixon).
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:45:04 PM EDT
[#20]
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:45:07 PM EDT
[#21]
Yes, hands down we could have won it.  If we would have been allowed to seal the borders from incursion, bomb the hell out of targets in the north, had the ability to attack staging areas in neighboring countries and cross their borders to harass the enemy and cut supply lines, we would have been fine.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:45:07 PM EDT
[#22]
Yes, hit them hard as soon as the air war started before they got better Soviet air defenses and bomb everything in north Vietnam.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:45:28 PM EDT
[#23]




Quoted:

Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.) Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed? Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure? Could an invasion of the north have worked? How would you keep China or the USSR out? Was there even enough troops available?



Discuss....


A big problem was getting rid of Diem.  Pretty sickening act, too.  Americans do not seem to realize that democracy cannot work everywhere (even if one can successfully argue that the Western experience with democracy has been a success, which is questionable at best IMO).  Unfortunately, a country without real external support, as the RVN was in 1975, is going to have a hard time against a country that is backed by multiple major Communist bloc powers.  I've heard that trying to create the ARVN in the U.S. Army's own image was a mistake as well, but I'm not so sure about that, especially as applies to direct combat between the conventional forces of the north and south.  



Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:47:42 PM EDT
[#24]
Ww2  style all out warfare, holding positons we took we would have crushed them alot sooner allowing them to take refuge in Laos and all the other political bs is what doomed us. Look at tet afterwards the vc were basically wiped  out. Despite what people think we kicked alot of ass out there.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:47:49 PM EDT
[#25]
Quoted:
Depends what you mean by "winning."

Let's break that up into two parts.

FIRST QUESTION:

Could the South have successfully resisted communist aggression and infiltration from the North?

I believe the answer to that is "yes," IF the right conditions had been created in the South.

Land reform, and giving farmers a stake of ownership in the land they worked, was moving things in the right direction in terms of fostering greater anti-communist sentiment among the poor, but unfortunatelly the reforms were not given enough time to work (which is tragic).

SECOND QUESTION:

Could the United States have invaded North Vietnam and effected "regime change" there?

That gets much more complicated.

A better question might be: "Could the U.S. have won a war against China?"  Because invading North Vietnam would very likely have brought that about.


That should have happened in Korea... They were all set and ready to push the button, and how much has been fucked because it didn't?
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:48:17 PM EDT
[#26]



Quoted:


Not with those damned M16s that kept getting jammed up at the worst times.







If we'd stuck with the M14, the war would have been won in weeks.









 
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:48:58 PM EDT
[#27]
Quoted:
Wow lots of info to digest. Without answering every question you asked, because it would be more like a history report, I will say this. This subject is one of the reasons I joined the Army, I just have so much respect not only for all veterans but I especially have a soft spot for Vietnam vets.

We were within two weeks of a full North Vietnam surrender shortly after LBJ ordered operation linebacker then operation linebacker II. That was the first real cross border carpet bombing by our B52's. They flattened the shit out of those commie bastards infrastructure  then hit em again because like the Japanese in WWII didn't get the message the first time. If we had only continued the bombing of the north history would be much different and 56K+ of our men would not have died in vein.



What is your source for that one?
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:50:03 PM EDT
[#28]




Quoted:

It was probably doomed from the moment we helped france attempt to retake 'their' colony after WWII.

A lot of vietnamese were treated very badly by the french, and being fucked over by foreigners tends to live long in peoples memory (just look at a civil war war of northern aggression thread here).





Why would we undermine our ally?  Look at how disastrous that became during the Suez Crisis.  Horrible impact that lasted decades and in a way harmful to Western institutions outside of Europe, North America, and Oceania.  Of course, we did little to help France when the insurgency rose up in the 1950s.



One interesting tid-bit was that when the Vietnamese rose up just after WWII the Japanese troops that had been occupying Indochina and had not yet been repatriated fought side-by-side with Americans and Frenchmen to subdue the uprising.  I bet it was weird for the Allied troops that had a short while earlier been engaged in bloody campaigns against those same Japs.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:50:05 PM EDT
[#29]
Just read a very interesting book on the French in Nam

The North was FANATIC to say the least

However, they are still human, and humans eventually accept defeat.

We should have won. Fucking liberals made sure we didn't
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:50:42 PM EDT
[#30]
We lost Viet Nam just like we will lose in Astan and Iraq.  The politicians will tie our hands like they did in Viet Nam.  They walk away and forget the sacrifice of many good men.  The Military did their job but Washington gave it away just like they're giving away Astan and Iraq.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:51:12 PM EDT
[#31]
Quoted:
Quoted:
Depends what you mean by "winning."

Let's break that up into two parts.

FIRST QUESTION:

Could the South have successfully resisted communist aggression and infiltration from the North?

I believe the answer to that is "yes," IF the right conditions had been created in the South.

Land reform and giving farmers a stake of ownership in the land they worked was moving things in the right direction in terms of fostering greater anti-communist sentiment among the poor, but unfortunatelly the reforms were not given enough time to work (which is tragic).

SECOND QUESTION:

Could the United States have invaded North Vietnam and effected "regime change" there?

That gets much more complicated.

A better question might be: "Could the U.S. have won a war against China?"  Because invading North Vietnam would very likely have brought that about.


China couldn't beat Vietnam in the late 70's when they tried to invade and that would be like us losing to Mexico.  China's military was gutted by the cultural revolution at that time.


A classic mistake people make today when studying the Vietnam war is to study it as if it happened in a vacuum.

It did not.

The Vietnam war was one facet of the entire Cold War as a whole, and has to be studied as part of a global stage.

Invading North Vietnam and possibly skirmishing with China then brings up another possibility that strategic planners at the time had to consider: that being, if Russia viewed us as being too heavily mortgaged in combat operations in Southeast Asia, would they have been tempted to invade Western Europe?

It is VERY EASY to look at the war in hindsight and dismiss such possibilities because they "didn't happen."

NO SUCH THING, however, was clear at the time, and these are the factors that American strategists had to agonize over in the 1960s.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:51:41 PM EDT
[#32]
Only if we had let the military take over the north and the south and the politicians let the generals destroy the enemy.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:51:45 PM EDT
[#33]
Nixon had nearly won the war. His bombing campaigns in NV were within 2 weeks of breaking their back. At the time no one knew this, and were happy that they had decided to come to the peace talks. Kennedy and Johnson both played along with the charade the North was plying that the Ho Chi Minh trail was not in Laos and Cambodia. They knew everything and did not act on it. Read the books by Plaster on SOG, some of he most heroic stories you will ever read, only to be dishonored by the betrayal of politicians.

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:52:26 PM EDT
[#34]
Quoted:
Quoted:
Depends what you mean by "winning."

Let's break that up into two parts.

FIRST QUESTION:

Could the South have successfully resisted communist aggression and infiltration from the North?

I believe the answer to that is "yes," IF the right conditions had been created in the South.

Land reform, and giving farmers a stake of ownership in the land they worked, was moving things in the right direction in terms of fostering greater anti-communist sentiment among the poor, but unfortunatelly the reforms were not given enough time to work (which is tragic).

SECOND QUESTION:

Could the United States have invaded North Vietnam and effected "regime change" there?

That gets much more complicated.

A better question might be: "Could the U.S. have won a war against China?"  Because invading North Vietnam would very likely have brought that about.


That should have happened in Korea... They were all set and ready to push the button, and how much has been fucked because it didn't?


From the sources I read, that would have started WW3 which while we may have won would have irradiated much of the world.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:55:30 PM EDT
[#35]
Oh I forgot. FUCK YOU JANE FONDA YOU GUTTER SLUT TRAITOR
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 5:56:18 PM EDT
[#36]
Quoted:

Quoted:
Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.) Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed? Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure? Could an invasion of the north have worked? How would you keep China or the USSR out? Was there even enough troops available?

Discuss....

A big problem was getting rid of Diem.  Pretty sickening act, too.  Americans do not seem to realize that democracy cannot work everywhere (even if one can successfully argue that the Western experience with democracy has been a success, which is questionable at best IMO).  Unfortunately, a country without real external support, as the RVN was in 1975, is going to have a hard time against a country that is backed by multiple major Communist bloc powers.  I've heard that trying to create the ARVN in the U.S. Army's own image was a mistake as well, but I'm not so sure about that, especially as applies to direct combat between the conventional forces of the north and south.  



We, the US, are overall horribly incompetent at training indigenous forces.  We start from the assumption that our institutional training is the most important, and try to replicate it in another context.  We then do indeed try to model them after us, even when it makes no sense to do so - because it is easier for us to do it that way.

Then, we take a training course that barely makes an American Soldier competent in N weeks, and create an 1/3(N) length version, often with barely intelligible training materials translated poorly from English, throw recruits into it with far less selectivity then we used for our own forces, and stick them in units with poorer leadership and less equipment - as the "leaders" are more half-ass trained than most of the rest.

Then, we complain bitterly about how they do not perform on par with western forces.

I laugh hearing the complaints about the IA and ANA these days - you can read the same stuff about the ARVN, and the South Koreans, usually with a not very subtle suggestion that racial or cultural obstacles prevent them from ever being an effective fighting force.  Funny, within just over 10 years of the US not micromanaging their Army, the ROK fielded forces in Vietnam that people still marvel about.

Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:06:55 PM EDT
[#37]
Johnson took advisement on the war from a group he called "the wise men" made up predominantly of CFR members. They pushed for escalation from the onset, but wanted the rules of engagement to favor the enemy all along. They told Johnson how he could win the war. Then inexplicably towards the end of his (Johnson's) term, they told him the war could not be won. Johnson was taking advisemnet on how to fight a war from a bunch of people who never wanted to conquer communism, but merely contain it; and they even failed at that. Johnson never had an original thought on how that war should have been managed.

The moral of the stroy here is that as long as agenda driven advisors and cabinet members make  policy for war, we can never win another war. Ultimately it all boils down to power and money. A lot of good kids died unnecessarilly in some jungle shit hole because a bunch of fat cat beaurocrats wanted to play politics.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:08:36 PM EDT
[#38]
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:10:55 PM EDT
[#39]
Quoted:

Quoted:
It was probably doomed from the moment we helped france attempt to retake 'their' colony after WWII.
A lot of vietnamese were treated very badly by the french, and being fucked over by foreigners tends to live long in peoples memory (just look at a civil war war of northern aggression thread here).


Why would we undermine our ally?  Look at how disastrous that became during the Suez Crisis.  Horrible impact that lasted decades and in a way harmful to Western institutions outside of Europe, North America, and Oceania.  Of course, we did little to help France when the insurgency rose up in the 1950s.

One interesting tid-bit was that when the Vietnamese rose up just after WWII the Japanese troops that had been occupying Indochina and had not yet been repatriated fought side-by-side with Americans and Frenchmen to subdue the uprising.  I bet it was weird for the Allied troops that had a short while earlier been engaged in bloody campaigns against those same Japs.


Yes, re-arming the Japanese to quell an independence movement probably didn't endear the vietnamese to us either.
As for helping france - how many billions (back when billions meant something) did we give them to chase the viet minh around?

People like the idea of freedom and independence, and with a little leadership, they with fight and die for it.
To have 'won' the vietnam war for more than a few years would have meant killing most of the people who had been fucked over by the french, or had their parents fucked over by the french, or their grandparents, etc etc.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:11:14 PM EDT
[#40]
Quoted:
I agree Adam.

We should have outsourced the whole creating a RVN Army to the ROK's.


Oh, they probably would have fucked it up too.  Conventional forces generally suck at training indigs.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:13:35 PM EDT
[#41]
American forces won every battle.  The folks in the military were sold out and their lives wasted by a bunch of pansy retards in Washington who felt it was their duty to 2nd guess and interfere with the field commanders.



The media and the incompetent civilian mid-managers sold the military out - cheap.  May they all experience Napalm in the afterlife - often.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:16:34 PM EDT
[#42]




Quoted:



Quoted:





Quoted:

Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.) Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed? Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure? Could an invasion of the north have worked? How would you keep China or the USSR out? Was there even enough troops available?



Discuss....


A big problem was getting rid of Diem. Pretty sickening act, too. Americans do not seem to realize that democracy cannot work everywhere (even if one can successfully argue that the Western experience with democracy has been a success, which is questionable at best IMO). Unfortunately, a country without real external support, as the RVN was in 1975, is going to have a hard time against a country that is backed by multiple major Communist bloc powers. I've heard that trying to create the ARVN in the U.S. Army's own image was a mistake as well, but I'm not so sure about that, especially as applies to direct combat between the conventional forces of the north and south.







We, the US, are overall horribly incompetent at training indigenous forces. We start from the assumption that our institutional training is the most important, and try to replicate it in another context. We then do indeed try to model them after us, even when it makes no sense to do so - because it is easier for us to do it that way.



Then, we take a training course that barely makes an American Soldier competent in N weeks, and create an 1/3(N) length version, often with barely intelligible training materials translated poorly from English, throw recruits into it with far less selectivity then we used for our own forces, and stick them in units with poorer leadership and less equipment - as the "leaders" are more half-ass trained than most of the rest.



Then, we complain bitterly about how they do not perform on par with western forces.



I laugh hearing the complaints about the IA and ANA these days - you can read the same stuff about the ARVN, and the South Koreans, usually with a not very subtle suggestion that racial or cultural obstacles prevent them from ever being an effective fighting force. Funny, within just over 10 years of the US not micromanaging their Army, the ROK fielded forces in Vietnam that people still marvel about.







Interestingly, pre-war, the U.S. military was more competent in this regard.  But it was also a common practice to have most of the officer and SNCO billets in foreign units be filled by American officers and NCOs, who would be seconded to the foreign military and be given appointments or commissions at a higher rank than their U.S. military rank.  The approach was also adapted more to the local conditions.  Regarding leadership, only gradually were indigenous recruits replacing Americans in such billets to ensure that there would be at least half-way decent leadership.



Of course, since 1946 the U.S. has been sans its largest colony.  The older colonial powers did much better in this regard because it was a necessity of colonialization.  The UK, for example, had a tiny regular army and yet it conquered the world, with a huge contribution coming from colonial troops that were trained and led by Britons (in the past the militia system played a important role as well; the Australians that fought in Europe during WWI were militiamen who volunteered for overseas service, as customarily the militia stayed at home, a custom the U.S. inherited upon independence and enshrined in the constitution; by WWI the militia system in Britain itself had seriously degraded, though, and was ultimately done away with).
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:20:37 PM EDT
[#43]




Quoted:



Quoted:





Quoted:

It was probably doomed from the moment we helped france attempt to retake 'their' colony after WWII.

A lot of vietnamese were treated very badly by the french, and being fucked over by foreigners tends to live long in peoples memory (just look at a civil war war of northern aggression thread here).





Why would we undermine our ally? Look at how disastrous that became during the Suez Crisis. Horrible impact that lasted decades and in a way harmful to Western institutions outside of Europe, North America, and Oceania. Of course, we did little to help France when the insurgency rose up in the 1950s.



One interesting tid-bit was that when the Vietnamese rose up just after WWII the Japanese troops that had been occupying Indochina and had not yet been repatriated fought side-by-side with Americans and Frenchmen to subdue the uprising. I bet it was weird for the Allied troops that had a short while earlier been engaged in bloody campaigns against those same Japs.




Yes, re-arming the Japanese to quell an independence movement probably didn't endear the vietnamese to us either.

As for helping france - how many billions (back when billions meant something) did we give them to chase the viet minh around?



People like the idea of freedom and independence, and with a little leadership, they with fight and die for it.

To have 'won' the vietnam war for more than a few years would have meant killing most of the people who had been fucked over by the french, or had their parents fucked over by the french, or their grandparents, etc etc.


Freedom did not come to most of the places granted independence.  Often the independence movements and armed resistance had nothing related to freedom in mind, quite the opposite, and that proved to be the case in Indochina as well.  Colonization was ultimately a positive force and ended all too soon and too quickly, and a lot of the blame for that falls upon the foreign policy of the U.S. since the days of FDR (Wilson served as a precursor to this in a way).  Ultimately, far more people in Indochina ended up screwed by independence and the subsequent victory of communism throughout the land that was in no small part the consequence than ever would have been screwed by France.  Western rule has proven to be better rule.  I'm not sure if there is any former colony that did not maintain settler rule that has done better since independence than before independence.

Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:28:10 PM EDT
[#44]
Quoted:

Quoted:
Quoted:

Quoted:
It was probably doomed from the moment we helped france attempt to retake 'their' colony after WWII.
A lot of vietnamese were treated very badly by the french, and being fucked over by foreigners tends to live long in peoples memory (just look at a civil war war of northern aggression thread here).


Why would we undermine our ally? Look at how disastrous that became during the Suez Crisis. Horrible impact that lasted decades and in a way harmful to Western institutions outside of Europe, North America, and Oceania. Of course, we did little to help France when the insurgency rose up in the 1950s.

One interesting tid-bit was that when the Vietnamese rose up just after WWII the Japanese troops that had been occupying Indochina and had not yet been repatriated fought side-by-side with Americans and Frenchmen to subdue the uprising. I bet it was weird for the Allied troops that had a short while earlier been engaged in bloody campaigns against those same Japs.


Yes, re-arming the Japanese to quell an independence movement probably didn't endear the vietnamese to us either.
As for helping france - how many billions (back when billions meant something) did we give them to chase the viet minh around?

People like the idea of freedom and independence, and with a little leadership, they with fight and die for it.
To have 'won' the vietnam war for more than a few years would have meant killing most of the people who had been fucked over by the french, or had their parents fucked over by the french, or their grandparents, etc etc.

Freedom did not come to most of the places granted independence.  Often the independence movements and armed resistance had nothing related to freedom in mind, quite the opposite, and that proved to be the case in Indochina as well.  Colonization was ultimately a positive force and ended all too soon and too quickly, and a lot of the blame for that falls upon the foreign policy of the U.S. since the days of FDR (Wilson served as a precursor to this in a way).  Ultimately, far more people in Indochina ended up screwed by independence and the subsequent victory of communism throughout the land that was in no small part the consequence than ever would have been screwed by France.  Western rule has proven to be better rule.  I'm not sure if there is any former colony that did not maintain settler rule that has done better since independence than before independence.


That is beside the point.  I'm not making the argument that communism is better than colonialism.
Just that enough of the natives were pissed about colonialism, and were naive enough about communism, that they were willing to put up a hell of a fight against colonialism and for freedom - even if that is not what they were really fighting against and for.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:29:49 PM EDT
[#45]
We won the war kinetically.

DC liberals fucked the whole thing politically.

Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:32:26 PM EDT
[#46]




Quoted:



Quoted:





Quoted:



Quoted:





Quoted:

It was probably doomed from the moment we helped france attempt to retake 'their' colony after WWII.

A lot of vietnamese were treated very badly by the french, and being fucked over by foreigners tends to live long in peoples memory (just look at a civil war war of northern aggression thread here).





Why would we undermine our ally? Look at how disastrous that became during the Suez Crisis. Horrible impact that lasted decades and in a way harmful to Western institutions outside of Europe, North America, and Oceania. Of course, we did little to help France when the insurgency rose up in the 1950s.



One interesting tid-bit was that when the Vietnamese rose up just after WWII the Japanese troops that had been occupying Indochina and had not yet been repatriated fought side-by-side with Americans and Frenchmen to subdue the uprising. I bet it was weird for the Allied troops that had a short while earlier been engaged in bloody campaigns against those same Japs.




Yes, re-arming the Japanese to quell an independence movement probably didn't endear the vietnamese to us either.

As for helping france - how many billions (back when billions meant something) did we give them to chase the viet minh around?



People like the idea of freedom and independence, and with a little leadership, they with fight and die for it.

To have 'won' the vietnam war for more than a few years would have meant killing most of the people who had been fucked over by the french, or had their parents fucked over by the french, or their grandparents, etc etc.


Freedom did not come to most of the places granted independence. Often the independence movements and armed resistance had nothing related to freedom in mind, quite the opposite, and that proved to be the case in Indochina as well. Colonization was ultimately a positive force and ended all too soon and too quickly, and a lot of the blame for that falls upon the foreign policy of the U.S. since the days of FDR (Wilson served as a precursor to this in a way). Ultimately, far more people in Indochina ended up screwed by independence and the subsequent victory of communism throughout the land that was in no small part the consequence than ever would have been screwed by France. Western rule has proven to be better rule. I'm not sure if there is any former colony that did not maintain settler rule that has done better since independence than before independence.





That is beside the point. I'm not making the argument that communism is better than colonialism.

Just that enough of the natives were pissed about colonialism, and were naive enough about communism, that they were willing to put up a hell of a fight against colonialism and for freedom - even if that is not what they were really fighting against and for.

But it does not follow from that that maintaining French rule was a hopeless endeavor, provided France's allies helped.  France was having a lot of trouble doing this by themselves at that point in time. They were shunned or undermined a lot by what they thought were their allies.  As far as U.S. interests were concerned, a French Indochina was better than a Communist Indochina or an Indochina that was incredibly vulnerable to getting conquere by Communism (which is what happened after the French left).



Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:36:03 PM EDT
[#47]
Quoted:
Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.)  Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed?  Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure?  Could an invasion of the north have worked?  How would you keep China or the USSR out?  Was there even enough troops available?

Discuss....


There was a book that came out some time ago written by NV General talking of how the war would have been lost a few years before it ended and the had estimated within 6 months after the end they would have had to sue for peace under any circumstances.
The tapes they kept getting of the US News kept them from capitulating......................................................
So the libs won the war, for the enemy that is.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:38:32 PM EDT
[#48]
Should've dropped MacNamara out of a B52 over Hanoi.

Blood of thousands on his hands. Westmoreland too, for going along with it.
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:46:24 PM EDT
[#49]
Question does not compute:  name a single battle or offensive we lost?
Link Posted: 11/29/2011 6:46:41 PM EDT
[#50]



Quoted:





Quoted:


Quoted:




Quoted:

Could the United States have overcome the fact that the government of the RVN was a corrupt house of cards and achieved any sort of legitimate victory in Vietnam? (Define victory as, at the minimum, an ongoing, separate and independent government in South Vietnam.) Was the opposition and social unrest in the US an unbeatable obstacle as the war progressed? Could the US have fully blocked the border of North and South Vietnam, and cut-off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then secured the RVN at its leisure? Could an invasion of the north have worked? How would you keep China or the USSR out? Was there even enough troops available?



Discuss....


A big problem was getting rid of Diem. Pretty sickening act, too. Americans do not seem to realize that democracy cannot work everywhere (even if one can successfully argue that the Western experience with democracy has been a success, which is questionable at best IMO). Unfortunately, a country without real external support, as the RVN was in 1975, is going to have a hard time against a country that is backed by multiple major Communist bloc powers. I've heard that trying to create the ARVN in the U.S. Army's own image was a mistake as well, but I'm not so sure about that, especially as applies to direct combat between the conventional forces of the north and south.







We, the US, are overall horribly incompetent at training indigenous forces. We start from the assumption that our institutional training is the most important, and try to replicate it in another context. We then do indeed try to model them after us, even when it makes no sense to do so - because it is easier for us to do it that way.



Then, we take a training course that barely makes an American Soldier competent in N weeks, and create an 1/3(N) length version, often with barely intelligible training materials translated poorly from English, throw recruits into it with far less selectivity then we used for our own forces, and stick them in units with poorer leadership and less equipment - as the "leaders" are more half-ass trained than most of the rest.



Then, we complain bitterly about how they do not perform on par with western forces.



I laugh hearing the complaints about the IA and ANA these days - you can read the same stuff about the ARVN, and the South Koreans, usually with a not very subtle suggestion that racial or cultural obstacles prevent them from ever being an effective fighting force. Funny, within just over 10 years of the US not micromanaging their Army, the ROK fielded forces in Vietnam that people still marvel about.







Interestingly, pre-war, the U.S. military was more competent in this regard.  But it was also a common practice to have most of the officer and SNCO billets in foreign units be filled by American officers and NCOs, who would be seconded to the foreign military and be given appointments or commissions at a higher rank than their U.S. military rank.  The approach was also adapted more to the local conditions.  Regarding leadership, only gradually were indigenous recruits replacing Americans in such billets to ensure that there would be at least half-way decent leadership.



Of course, since 1946 the U.S. has been sans its largest colony.  The older colonial powers did much better in this regard because it was a necessity of colonialization.  The UK, for example, had a tiny regular army and yet it conquered the world, with a huge contribution coming from colonial troops that were trained and led by Britons (in the past the militia system played a important role as well; the Australians that fought in Europe during WWI were militiamen who volunteered for overseas service, as customarily the militia stayed at home, a custom the U.S. inherited upon independence and enshrined in the constitution; by WWI the militia system in Britain itself had seriously degraded, though, and was ultimately done away with).
Have you guys read "Triumph Forsaken"?  



Excellent book about our early involvement (1954-1965) in Viet-nam.   It makes the case that Diem was a good, strong, and respected leader among his people, but that we were insisting that he install "reforms" to bequeath more "rights". . . He told the Americans that they cannot take what works in the USA and expect it to work in other lands and cultures.   He refused to acquiesce to actions that he felt would make him look weak and lose "face" (very important in Asia!) among the South Vietnamese. . .For his stubborness to stand up against this pressure, he was assassinated.   Also reveals what a POS many of the early reporters were––-especially David Halberstram. . . Highly recommend. . . Volume II deals with 1965––1975, but has not been published yet. . .





 
Arrow Left Previous Page
Page / 3
Close Join Our Mail List to Stay Up To Date! Win a FREE Membership!

Sign up for the ARFCOM weekly newsletter and be entered to win a free ARFCOM membership. One new winner* is announced every week!

You will receive an email every Friday morning featuring the latest chatter from the hottest topics, breaking news surrounding legislation, as well as exclusive deals only available to ARFCOM email subscribers.


By signing up you agree to our User Agreement. *Must have a registered ARFCOM account to win.
Top Top