Most people would need two things to feel good about going into a war, i.e. a decent cause and a decent chance to win. Neither Vietnam nor Ukraine had/has either of the two.
And there is another consideration that seems obvious to me:
There needs to be a minimum set of conditions for ever using draftees in combat, which to me would amount to a full declaration of war by the US Senate and a full national commitment to destroy some enemy in the most efficient manner, and we never had that for Vietnam either.
The idea of telling the boy next door that he has any kind of a patriotic duty to go into harms way for some kind of a geopolitical game strikes me as heinous.
“Most people would need two things to feel good about going into a war, i.e. a decent cause and a decent chance to win. Neither Vietnam nor Ukraine had/has either of the two.”
That’s effed up. In retrospect, Vietnam might not have ever been a place we could nail down without invading the north, sinking Russian and Chinese cargo ships etc.
But it was a good cause.