Was the war in Vietnam ever winable? Or at least not such a disaster?

Was the war in Vietnam ever winable? Or at least not such a disaster?

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Sure, if they bombed Hanoi directly.

yes. the hippiefags were the reason why we left.

Yes, although whether it was worth getting involved in the first place is a valid question. It was entirely winnable, leftist media realized they could demoralize soldiers and erode support at home if they broadcast American casualties which had never been done before. All in effort to help the Soviets. It worked.

Invasion of North Vietnam
Invasion of Laos
Invasion of Cambodia

Totally winnable but we were practicing being a global police force. It was never about winning. It was about submission and r&d to figure out how to implement a global system of control.

Without politican interference the US would've crushed the NVA militarily. Whether or not they could turn a long-term occupation of the north into a stable situation afterwards is another matter. VC probably would've fucked off into the jungle and waited them out the way they did with the french, japs, french, chinese etc. Ultimately they were willing to continue the fight forever until they either won or were all killed.

Except the US won the Vietnam War, as soon as they started Op. Linebacker II and began targetting northern infrastructure, ammo depots, and the capital itself, which prior administrations had refused to do, tying the hands of the air force.

North Korea sued for peace within 6 months and the US pulled out their forces, having stabalised the region and prevented an avalanche of communist takeovers in the region.

Then 2 years later, with the US no longer involved (or wanting to be involved due to an administration change), the North invaded the South.

The South lost in 1975, the US didn't.

>Was the war in Vietnam ever winable?
No, you can't win if there is no wincon. It was a war that existed to be a war.
>at least not such a disaster?
What? It went exactly as it was supposed to. It ended earlier than they hoped but it was generally a huge success.
What do you think the objective of it was? Because by any metric all objectives were met.

why didnt they?

the mass casaulties.

Well, as we learned, most Americans didn't care that some soldiers literally shot babies.

Democrats are Unironically the reason why the South lost.
We had those zipperheads on their knees by the end of the war, but then they got wind of Dem. plans to kill the bill that would supply south Vietnam with the provisions necessary to defend themselves.
They waited for the US to withdraw and attacked
In short, Democrats not only got us into Vietnam, they not only lost the war, they continue to blame republicans for it
Fuck democrats

American involved acomplished merely holes in the ground, how is that a great success?

The reason for our involvement was to sell equipment, secure or destroy agricultural holdings, and cause casualities. It was entirely a war fought for corporations and they profited greatly from it and in this way it was very successful. Actual military objectives didn't matter because they weren't the point. What the men sent over there actually did didn't matter.

Well, we (((won))) the Cold War, so everything worked out end. Who knows what would have happened if we spent more money there. Even so, it was still wrong the way we ditched S. Vietnam.

*In the* end. Derp.

youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk

What does it mean, hippies prevented US from winning. What was the position of big media?

It was the same problem with Iraq in 2014 but magnified. We were defending a people who didn't even care enough themselves. It could have been avoided entirely if we let them have independence like we promised after ww2.

Fucking democracy and free speech is a mistake. The left should be lynched in the streets

with the good peoples yes
also letting cambodia hiding the vc was a mistake

Of course it was winnable. The world just didn't send their best...

If the USA didn't get themselves cucked by the UN and the hippies at home protesting they would have won it easily.

The problem with modern wars is that unlike conventional wars they dont have a clear moment where you plant a flag in the dirt and its over and you win everything.

The entire purpose of vietnam was to drain resources and personel from the soviet and chinese nations. The end result for vietnam was that chinese expansion pretty much halted and none of the communist nations set up in southern asia lasted more than a few years.

They didnt have enough capital or resources left to run themselves and collapsed into genocide and infighting spectacularly illustrating that communism is a raging dumpster fire.

Vietnam was successful. It just wasnt won like WW2 with an unconditional surrender because thats just not how wars are fought anymore.

The reality is that vietnam actually was supported by a silent majority. University campuses like UC Berkley just had big noisy protests that got all the coverage and depicted the war as unpopular.

The war didnt become unpopular until after the Tet Offensive. The us military was convinced that the war was pretty much totally over. It actually seemed like it kinda was. Hostilities had ceased in many provinces and trickled down to nothing in the others, it seemed like maybe some sort of north/south diplomacy similar to korea could be tried and we'd go home.

The Tet Offensive was actually a massiveley crushing defeat for the commies but it was so over the top violent that people back home finally abandoned support because theyd felt lied to.

Dont buy the hollywood narrative that from the first bomb to the last soldier home the public was just 100% LSD dropping draft card burning hippies protesting it.

It had popular support for the main duration, the hippies were like ANTIFA of the day. Loud, sensational, highly reported, fostered and encouraged by colleges and universities, but ultimatley they were a vast minority that was simply over-covered by media.

>China expansion halted

They control the whole continent through economics.

Thank you based Burger

Too many retard foreigners who get their history from shitty (((movies))) when it comes to Vietnam.

Also a note on all of those "tragic" national guard protest shootings. The media covered up that in all cases where national guard fired on protestors they were either fired on first, or somebody in the protests utilized fireworks to simulate gunfire. In other cases the protestors had taken school faculty hostage and the national guard were in fact rescuing the hostages, NOT gunning down poor helpless flower waving hippies.

The myth that hippies were peaceful is historic revision. The hippies preached peace and love but were every bit as violent as any other radical group.

Im sure 50 years from now movies and documentaries will depict ANTIFA in much the same manner. The hippies worked very hard to push those national guardsmen to open fire.

I hope the hippiefags with the NV flags were beaten

Alright lads, grab a chair and let me tell you about the greatest failure of the US Air Force.

After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Lyndon Johnson and McNamara gave the go ahead for Operation Rolling Thunder, an air campaign with the objectives of bolstering the South's flagging morale, convince the Commies to knock it off, and at the same time stop the flow of men and supplies southward. From the beginning the Operation was horrifically mismanaged and poorly conceived, and turned into the the longest and costliest air operation ever carried out by the USAF, and our greatest defeat. McNamara was an accountant and it showed in his leadership - he insisted on number crunching everything, and attempting to run the war from Washington. Every detail of every mission carried out in Rolling Thunder was delivered from Washington, down to the individual targets and number and types of ordnance to be dropped on them. This might not have been so bad, but the real failure of Rolling Thunder was in its theory of **gradual escalation** - basically Johnson thought that the best way to dissuade the commies was to hit them progressively harder the more they resisted. All this ended up accomplishing was the AF being employed in hideously ineffective ways, with B-52s dropping bombs on supply trucks on the Ho Chi trail, and Thunderchiefs handling the strategic bombing. This all combined with horribly restrictive ROEs which, for example, prohibited hitting SAM sites until they had a missile on the rails getting ready to launch. This morass of incompetence on the part of Washington leadership spanned 3 years and resulted in the loss of 1000 aircrew and almost the same number of aircraft lost without achieving any of the strategic goals.

To be continued...

Yes, they could just drop nuclear nukes and completely destroy that piece of land. Would be as unreasonable as the war itself.

all you need to know
youtube.com/watch?v=0uqjznmTp80

Now, back to OP's question; could Vietnam have been won? Allow me to highlight the last 2 air campaigns of the Vietnam War, Operations Linebacker I and II. In 1972, the North launched the Tet offensive, utterly smashing both the South's lines of defense and the notion in America that the war was winding down. To stop the South from being utterly crushed, Nixon cut the leash off the Air Force who then proceeded within 6 months to smash North Vietnamese logistical capabilities and AA defenses, cutting supplies to the commies by 70% and stopping the offensive.

However, Nixon did not have it in him to try and properly win the war, though at least he demanded some sort of "Peace with Honor". So when the Commies started stalling in the Paris talks, Nixon finally let the USAF do what it does best and go to Hanoi to wreck their homes. **NOTE: This was the FIRST TIME that bombers hit Hanoi and Haiphong. Yes, we waited until the closing days of the war to actually BOMB THEIR CAPITOL and the PORT WHERE ALMOST ALL OF THEIR SUPPLIES WERE BEING SHIPPED IN. Over 200 B-52s flew up north and within less than 2 weeks the Commies were back at the negotiating table.

Almost done....

All of those young men were drafted, sent to fight for our government, those who survived and returned home were looked down upon by our citizens and their own fucking government. This was the beginning of the spread of degeneracy and the fall of the U.S.
Divorce rate soared, hippie movement, feminism, and single parent households.

Check McNamara's Fog of War. It's a good movie. Also at one point it is explained that the Vietnamese looked at Americans as invaders and S.V. as their puppet state. Now imagine Your country is a Caliphate and the state support Sharia. Will you let them win OP ?

There was a wincon though. To stop communist activity in the North of Vietnam and surrounding countries.

watch the Ken Burns series documentary that came out this year on PBS
its fucking really good and i hate PBS

youtube.com/watch?v=3j-3Xi5BcKs

they fucked up, they realized they fucked up and instead of admitting they fucked up and pulling out they started the draft. All to protect their fucking egos

Now for the moral of the story; though the Air Force is often joked about being the "wimpy" service, the sheer destructive power they command is unmatched. However, for it to be effective, air power must be properly applied. Of the seven Tenets of Air Power, the three most misused in Vietnam were centralized control/decentralized execution, concentration, and priority. McNamara did not allow for decentralized exception, as he damn near all but flew the jets himself. This same mistake was made by Obama with having every drone strike in Iraq go through him. Concentration was overlooked here as Johnson was being too much of a pussy trying to play nice with the north rather than wrecking their shit. In the Gulf War, this mistake was rectified with Operation Instant Thunder, wherein they developed a 3 stage plan to destroy everything in Iraq, than just moved all the stages into one and blew up everything at once. Compare that with the limpwristed "gradual" response in Rolling Thunder - that's why the Gulf War was quick and Vietnam was a boondoggle. Finally, Priority; as previously mentioned, we waited until the last months of the war to hit the enemy capitol and their main harbor. We quite literally had B-52s dropping bombs on the jungle, trying to hit supply trucks that were worth less than the bombs being used to kill them, while in Haiphong, ships loaded with supplies from China were docking and unloading all the time. Leadership lost the Vietnam war, pure and simple.

>le Soviet conspiracy

yes if they went ahead with the plan to use tatical nuclear weapons but alas the commies would have retaliated.

Nice analysis!

Vietnam and Laos are still communist.

*tips revisionism*

>The myth that hippies were peaceful is historic revision.
ummm what were yippies?

Media faked stuff and used crisis actors just like today.

Only way to win would have been to nuke China, There is a reason we never did an invasion of NViet though it could have been relatively easy from sea.

Evil imperialist Americans
Killing old people and the handicapped
Shame on you
youtu.be/u5tygCaY9a0

I'm sure the US government actually left because of some hippies at home.
We're pretty well known for that.

>Except the US won the Vietnam War

Seriously, our goal was always to get the US out, overthrow South Vietnam government and unify the country. All objectives completed.

So yeah, we won too. But hey, the US can say that they won in kill counts, everyone is happy, Peace.

This
Using le humor to ridicule something which has been proven correct with the declasification of archives
.Jews are gunna jew

No.

These little monkeys had been at war against the Chinese, then the french and then us over the last four generations. Could we have "won" by nuking or firebombing the shit out of it? And guarded the irradiated remains? Not without brining about a war with Communist China.

The Vietnamese didn't care about communism and they didn't want to tow the Chinese or Russian line in world affairs. They just wanted outsiders out of their country.

Eisenhower considered going full-out in Viet Nam after the French got bfto at Diem Bin Phu. His best generals told him: a land war in Asia is un-winnable. Ike stayed out.

Kennedy: typically half-assed. Set the stage for Johnson to fuck it up completely.

Johnson wanted the Great Society, needed the Conservative Southern Democratic committee chairmen in the Senate to let the legislation go through. They were all "muh dominoes!" LBJ thought he could cut a deal with Ho Chi Minh which wasn't going to happen. They weren't giving up half their country for some damns and other cookies.

Nixon's "peace" was doomed from the jump. Once the 1972 US elections and the US troops were all gone, ("Vietnamization") the North was going to sweep in. It didn't help that Nixon was crippled by Watergate and Ford had no hope of getting the overwhelmingly liberal congress elected in the wake of it in 1974 to help the RSVN in 1975.

The US military did the best it could. The North simply realized what Nixon was up to by "Vietnamizing" the war--getting the f out. They waited until we left. And the US didn't support the South with massive military aid or air support, and they rolled in.

If we'd left them alone after they beat the French, they'd have been an asian Tiger 20 years earlier and a pain in Mao's ass in the 70's.

Keep telling yourself that

Well, I mean, with the Paris Peace Accords there were technically two Vietnam wars, one that ended with the accords and one that ended with the fall of Saigon

are you kidding? it was a war for money it was supposed to go on forever. just like our convenient war on terror.

This!

Yes it was winnable but it was all about the CIA smuggling golden triangle heroin into the US.

It could have been won if the military was allowed to attack supply lines across borders and if the US Army employed the Green Beret model of training and mentoring South Vietnamese field units. Sadly the army didn't attempt that on large scale until late in the war.

First the French fucked everything up and forced Americans join, then refused to help themselves, the South Vietnamese leaders fucked up non-stop from beginning to end, the neighboring countries harbored Vietcong so there was way to kill them all, it was infinitely easier to make enemies with the population than friends.

No it's was never winnable from the start, just like Afghanistan. They could only hope to thin the herd.

Stop watching these alex joneish conspiracy theories.

its called the military industrial complex and its why we are always perpetually at war.

war is always about money (wealth acquisition). unless you're the one being attacked.

Maybe if a major air campaign and ground offense into the north happened, also maybe if almost all the ARVN didn’t get leave during Tet

it's entirely possible that it could have been, at an earlier stage.

but the longer it dragged on, the harder it became to win.

The problem was our forces went in, (when we were in the phase where we trained local troops) we were prepared for conventional warfare. We were using WW2 strategies in an enfironment that was unlike anything we'd encountered in Europe, and against the very populace itself, who had expendable numbers, home field advantage, and guerrilla warfare that we were not prepared for.

The problem was also that we did not want to risk war with China, and we did not want to involve Russia either.

if we had directly invaded north vietnam, we very well could have triggered World War 3, and nobody wanted that at the time. But the result was we were basically just sitting outside the cockroach nest and squashing a few whenever they crossed over, but never dealing with the actual problem.

like

said though, the better question is whether we should have gotten involved to begin with.

And there was also a massive failure on our part to support Ho Chi Minh when he was seeking our help in liberating Vietnam from the French.

He wrote to President Truman, begging him to put aside the Communist ideology part of his politics, and help him liberate Vietnam. (a Sentiment which the US actually did sympathize with, due to the US' colonial history) but there's evidence to suggest Truman never got his letters.

We were also held by the balls by France, who basically, threatened to fall into Russia's influence if we didn't let them keep Vietnam and rebuild their empire.

We should have called their bluff, liberated Vietnam, and then dealt with whatever shitfit france threw.

Once we had the status quo of Chinese backed North Vietnam, it was already too late.

Especially since them it became about the politics. JFK basically kept the war going just because politically, letting vietnam fall to communism would have cost him reelection.

>If we'd left them alone after they beat the French, they'd have been an asian Tiger 20 years earlier and a pain in Mao's ass in the 70's.

This might have been true. We were actually on friendly term with the US during WW2. The US could probably have won us over but then they just have to let the French come back. We never like China anyways and the Russian proved to be unreliable later on.

It was winable, but it was pointless. At least it gave us cool films and vidya.

>We were also held by the balls by France, who basically, threatened to fall into Russia's influence if we didn't let them keep Vietnam and rebuild their empire.

At least we got to humiliate the French. That was good.

This goes back to the Treaty of Versailles. At the time Europe was arguing over how to split up the world under colonial rule and the French got Vietnam. In the proceedings the US had every ability to step in and some even wanted to however any talk of that was stopped when strategy was determined. It was the French of the Vietnamese and we had determined that the French were a more important partner in global politics and strategy. Most of the worlds shit can be tracked back to that shit (((treaty))) which almost entirely ignored the fact that it was treaties that lead up to that same great war, only to walk right into the second one.

>French over the Vietnamese
Fuck I'm tired.

And your refugees have produced quite a few qts for our pleasure

No. It was purely a Jewish war designed to make
>the world hate America
>build an anti American/pro communist/divided mentality amongst Americans
>kill 50,000 American patriots

I cant blame you for that one. Everyone likes to talk shit about the jews getting us into wars but what about france? 3 of our 4 biggest wars ever were because france dragged us into them.

Where are the eternal baguette threads?

He literally got all of his information in his post from the new PBS documentary 'The Vietnam War' which came out last week.

Literally every single thing he said was directly taken from that lol... fucking retarded leaf.

You even used (((echos))) when everything the guy said in his post was from a documentary produced by (((them)))

Should have just nuked the gooks. Seemed to work for Imperialist Japan.

Could someone please explain to me why the Vietnam War is considered a loss for america?

>south vietnam attacked by north vietnam
>usa goes in to defend south vietnam
>usa absolutely destroys north vietnam
>usa teaches south vietnamese how to defend themselves
>usa leaves
>turns out gooks cant do shit and north vietnam attack south vietnam again, after we left

If your child is retarded beyond saving, do you blame the teacher for failing to teach it calculus?

I dont have a TV or watch movies or documentaries. I just read books. But I mean if reliable sources offend you I can always just go back to spouting off vague "facts" learned from hollywood movies.

>north korea sued for peace.
Thats not what happened, recoloring history. MacArthur was warned and told not go past the parallel out of fear the chinks n soviets would join the war.

The same puppet dictator was still ruling after the japs left, so they assumed the US didnt care.

Bad calls from both sides.

Yes... I also watched (((ken burns))) new Vietnam war documentary...

I'm not trying to smugly act as though I'm a professor of history giving a lecture to internet autists.

I guess I can see a little logic in letting the French back. But do you think with a little more thinking, America would have realized the mess they are making? Were the fact that we manage to beat the French really that out of calculation?

Because we wasted a decade, american lives, and probably billions of dollars for something you couldn't stop from happening.

Funny story
>Be me
>dating korean qt 3.14
>she has vietnamese friend
>invite us over for dinner
>cool
>eating ass sorts of gook food I cant pronounce the name off
>mutual friend's dad "So user, what do you do for work?"
>Oh well, im a marine
>table goes quiet
>grand dad looks like a combination of pissed and freaked out
>bareley speaks english "marine.... killl my.... whole village.."
>pho spilling from pockets
>just say "shit that sucks"
>he runs upstairs and locks himself in his bedroom
>family are all yelling at me in mixture of vietnamese and engrish
>girlfriend is crying from embarassment, pretty sure such behavior led to our breakup a few months later

Good food tho.

Lol.
After getting called out pretend you never watched it along with everyone else this last week.

Nice.

But the US was not the teacher but the parent of the child. That's why in extension, it is your loss too. Without US intervention, South Vietnamese government wouldn't have existed at all.

Seriously though, I don't care if you try to rationalize it as not-a-loss or whatever. What's important is that we managed to avoid the whole North-South fuckery like the Korean. And that's enough of a win to us.

Im tellin ya bruh. I dont have a TV.

You can watch it online.

It was a horrible war so there're people from both sides that can't get over it. Can't blame them.

We won in the end anyway. How many Starbucks are in Hanoi?

And you have so many weebs that one would think that Japan won WW2. Starbucks is shit btw.

Would South Vietnam be as developed as South Korea if it was still around today?

Hard to tell. I don't think it would. I'll admit that I can't give very informed opinion about this without sounding biased though.I would say that the reason for South Vietnamese government's failure is the corruption and its unpopularity among the people. But I think that South Korea government used to have that too.

Oh! He doesn't have a tv!

He thinks he's some kind of special snowflake for leaving the 90's like literally everyone else has.

You're trying awfully hard to convince us you didn't watch it and you're above us plebs.

If you think that is nice analysis, you should just watch (((Ken Burns))) PBS documentary 'The Vietnam War' where he practically parapraphrased the entire 20 hour series into 3 paragraphs.

Youre just projecting. Im discussing something relevant to the thread and you somehow got butthurt about it.

Find one spot in there where im highroading anyone here.

I dont own a Tv cuz im broke as fuck, not cuz im some sort of right wing hipster.

I'm not projecting and I'm not butt hurt

I just want you to admit you watched the new documentary this week because I'm 90% sure you did

at least you're not as bad as

He should of started his first post off with

>Alright lads, grab a chair and let me tell you about the greatest failure of the US Air Force that I just learned about last week on PBS and will now paraphrase the whole series for you

you spelled left wrong.
Just found a used 55inch element smart tv for $200.

China. They didn't want another Korean War. 300000 Chinese soldiers served in NV as a deterrent to attack. There was no "winning" as there was no desire to fight the enemy on his territory.

All wrong.

Was the removal of Diem inevitable or preventable? Went down hill from there. Trying to decide whether JFK fucked up on this one matter.

youtube.com/watch?v=hPy1LkB1dRA

as far as I know it was "won" when the burgers left, there was a north and south vietnam like the korea situation. We "lost" vietnam because as soon as a democrat president was in office he cut all the promised to aid to south vietnam and let them get COMMED. For as much as hippies like to bleat about how vietnam was a senseless waste of live, it's entirely their vault for that. Imagine you buying me a soda, I pour it on the ground and then start telling you you were an idiot for wasting money on that soda.

Depends, what's your definition of "winning"?

It was easily winnable within a month if we bombed the hell out of them right from the start and relentlessly pounded their ass.

Fucking hippies and "muh optics" of bombing cities.