1. Not cracking down on the Communist’s allies here in the US.
That gave the commies something to manipulate -- our media.
Thanh Tran appreciates your salute and says that your capitalization is lacking.
Thanh apparently learned English.
Sending “messages” to the enemy by taking nonstrategic hills and then giving them back for absolutely no reason other than “to send a message” that the other guy isn’t listening to nor cares about.
2]Vietnam, as is Afghanistan and Iraq is/was not just those countries. But involves resources being brought into such countries. Outside actors continuously resupplied NVA. Those have to be contained or either you kill everyone in the country. That was never done.
2. The draft should have been ended after WWII. One of the big mistakes was putting disgruntled conscripts into the Air Force and Navy where they had access to very expensive equipment to sabotage. Keeping the draft gave radical groups much more power than they otherwise would have had. Nixon campaigned on ending the draft in 68'. He instead went to Congress in 71' to get an extension.
3. It should have been realized even before 64' that the North Vietnamese Politburo wasn't going to settle for anything less than unification no matter how many lives it took. Regime change was never on the menu.
Ken Burns is a left wing propagandist.
1, and only 1, running the war like a liberal.
To me, the problem since Vietnam is that the politicians took control of the fight rather than the professional soldiers. Politicians have no spine and cannot make the tough decisions it takes to win a war. Rather, they want to fight a “nice war” and the other side knows that. Get the politicians out of the decision making and the rules of engagement and the war will be shorter and end up saving American lives.
#19 - The eventual national Lottery for WW2 was for the duration of the war + 6 months.
WW2 had 66% draftees. Korea has over 50% draftees. Vietnam had 25% draftees in-country.
An incorrect correlation would say that the more draftees the greater chance of victory.
MacArthur was right either wage the war for a quick decisive end or don't do it at all.
Two major blunders that turned victory into defeat during the war.
1. After the Tet offensive the war was over by all accounts. The Russians said so. The North Vietnamese said so. Everyone except one person. Walter Cronkite whom made it seems like the North Vietnamese won a major victory. This inspired the North to keep going.
Our mistake was not using military personal only as war reporters.
2. After our final pull out the South won the war it was over. They had the military strength the hold their ground no one contested that except our media. It was Ted Kennedy that pushed a bill through to cut funding for the South. The word alone disrupted the military in the south. Every division broke up except one.
One other point I think should have been done. The war was to stop communism. That should've been an all volunteer bases. If they couldn't get enough soldiers for the volunteer effort we had no business requiring kids to fight.
Communism is evil but it wasn't a national threat to keep them at bay. It wasn't a direct threat to the US.
Drug use by troops was a mistake but whose fault was that?
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco the US was clearly on the geopolitical defensive. Rostow, who was a Deputy National Security Advisor at the time, sent a memo to Kennedy detailing three places where the US could push back in order to restore our position vis a vis the Soviets - Berlin, where we had the most to gain but where the risk of triggering WW III was greatest. Laos, where we could probably defeat the communists but who would notice. South Vietnam, which seemed perfect in terms of visibility, and strength of the opposition.
Kennedy went to Berlin and made a speech in which he declared himself to be a breakfast pastry. ("Ich bin ein berliner" as opposed to "ich bin berliner".)
Laos, and the NVA's whole right flank, were publicly written off in negotiations. (None of the geniuses apparently could read a map.) CIA operations there were reactive and on too small a scale to interdict supplies to the NVA and VC.
The South Vietnam conflict was escalated and escalated but with obvious results. (None of those geniuses had apparently read Sun Tzu or studied any Asian history either.)
Anyway, it has always been my opinion that Walt Whitman Rostow didn't get near the kicking around he richly deserved.
There is an old saying in conflict theory that if one side is saying "What is mine, is mine and what is yours is negotiable" and the other side plays by those rules they are going to lose.
Almost all the fighting was South of the DMZ we never once sent a major battle force North of the DMZ to take and hold ground. Yet the NVA and VC were constantly attacking South of the DMZ. Hell we never sent troops into Cambodia to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail until Nixon and he only did so in attempt to get a stronger position in the peace negotiations. Nixon finally mined the harbors in the North to stop the influx of war materials into the country by USSR and China but again that was well towards the end and to get a stronger position in the negotiations.
You don't win a war by just killing people you also remove their ability to make war by taking all their territory and destroying/denying their resupply chains. But apparently we don't do that anymore.
um... fight to win, and do whatever necessary to win as quickly as possible with the fewest casualties on OUR side.
that is the only mistake.
Either fight to win, or don’t fight at all.
Only one of your mistakes was partially fatal, mining the harbors too late. However, once they were mined and the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam got underway in December 1972, probably another 3-5 days of the same intensity would have won the war outright. The NV government was at the point of surrender but Nixon by then was carrying operation Linebacker II to get the prisoners home and the NV back to the table and not to win the war. Had he known they were ready to surrender, he would have no doubt kept going but he didnt. He had his tactics right but his goals wrong and it cost us the war and wasted 58,000 American lives.
If you don't have that as your ultimate goal, there's no point in fighting.