I definitely agree that LBJ screwed all of us with his idiotic limits. He was a typical democrat in that they start wars, invest other parent's children, then make things tougher for our side to win.
Now my bona fides:I went on from Vietnam to be commissioned and the served 28 years including as an artillery battalion commander and a student at the Command and Staff College. Later I developed fire support technologies for the Marine Corps as a civilian, lecturing on fire support to several venues. So there.
You, my friend suffer from "excessive Air Forcesness". It is a disease that I am very familiar with, since my Dad and both Uncles were in the Air Force and regarded my time in the Corps as a sort of unfortunate birth defect. This disease causes one to sort of sweep one's hand over maps and say "bomb here, bomb here, war over". Not so fast - just taking Overlord into account, the massive tonnage dropped did cripple the German ability to marshall and move reinforcements to the front but didn't completely eliminate it. As it was, it was the sacrifices of the army's landing forces that defeated the Germans at enorous loss - losses that might have been reduced some at Omaha if there had been decent close air support to take out the German positions overlooking those beaches.
How about the crippling stasis at Anzio? Despite energetic interdiction by the USAAF in that theater, the troops were pinned in their enclave for months while they were pounded by long-range German artillery that the Air Force couldn't find. Despite the inspiring conceptions of Douhet and Mitchell, bombing alone never concludes the battle. And sometimes it doesn't even contribute much, as in the difficulty in locating and reducing the Chinese movements in North Korea in 1951.
In our war, if LBJ had gone with the all-out air war, it might have done much more that we really did but did we have sufficent assets in theater in experience pilots, appropraite aircraft, operational fields, ordnance in dumps to conduct a campaign of the scale you are talking about? I seem to remember that it took years to accumulate all of those assets in the awe-inspiring quantities that we eventually did have in Thailand, South Vietnam, Guam, and offshore with the carriers.
Air wars are powerful things but there are limits. The lessons we should get from analyzing Vietnam are how things went they were so we won't do the same things again. Unfortunately, we keep electing new versions of LBJ, so the point is moot.
It has been enjoyable. This is the kind of dialogue I tried to get students to engage in.
“excessive Air Forcesness” has also been called “the Zeus lightening bolt complex.” I “joined the people who joined the Army” four times in my career, so this is not the first time I’ve heard the charge.
My simple reply is that the GPS-guided PGMs have replaced the Norden bombsight. Satellites and drones provide surveillance for locating targets that wasn’t even dreamed of a couple decades ago, let alone WWII. Mitchell, Douhet, and Trenchard were about a century ahead of their time. The technology of the early and mid 20th Century just couldn’t begin to support their warfighting concepts. We are only now approaching the required level of technology.
Look — I agree that there is no replacing boots on the ground to control territory and politics. My “message” in today’s world is that Americans don’t do COIN well — pursuing that strategy is fighting on the battlefield of the enemy’s choice. Americans put steel on the target best — that is our strong suit. Not to use U.S. technological strength to maximum advantage would be as stupid as going to the Ia Drang to assault an enemy-fortified mountain instead of bombing the Haiphong docks. It’s just a dumb way to squander U.S. lives.
We didn’t have to occupy Hanoi to make it all but impossible for the DRV to resupply major, meaningful forces in the RVN. The logistics to move the amount of ammo required by the VC/NVA just to stay in the field (not to mention to be on offense) required much more infrastructure than bicycles and porters. If Johnson had targeted that infrastructure before it was heavily defended as I have outlined previously, Adm Sharp’s prediction would have been fact.
Regarding the enemy today — Islam — I lived in Peshawar and worked with the PAK military daily for more than a year. The only thing those people understand is who has more force and who has the stones to use it. Compassion and not using force to preclude collateral damage is understood as weakness and cowardice, not some humanitarian virtue.
All jihadist organizations are sponsored by nation-states. Without nation-state support they are like gangs of thugs terrorizing local neighborhoods.
I know this war plan won’t happen in my lifetime, but what we need to do is go after the supporting nation-states and wipe a couple cities of ragheads from the face of the earth. The ragheads would understand that message and jihad against the West would cease for a a century or two — as it did after the crushing jihadist defeats in 732 and 1683. Jihad is like Haley’s Comet, it will be just keep on coming back — it is built into Islam. All we can do is smash it when it appears. The get-tough principle needs to be implemented domestically as well.
The ultimate solution is to make Mecca/Medina into radioactive holes and post a sign — “Allah — Out of Business.” Islam is based on the belief that Allah is all powerful and Islam can’t lose. That is the belief that must be destroyed to end jihad. It was the same thing with Hitler and the Emperor.