Military strategists going forward should study Vietnam for how not to fight a war. You never play with one hand tied behind your back. When you to war, you go to war with the intent to win and that means defeating the enemy.
I'm a Vietnam Vet, saw this SH*t firsthand and it pissed us off..........WTF, OVER, you want us to win this f****** war or not?!?!?
It's still happening in Afghanistan and it pisses our Military off still.
I have high hopes for Sec. Mattis!
you go to war with the intent to win
We could have destroyed Hanoi a dozen times over.
But instead, we sent 18 and 19 year old Americans into a pointless continuation of what the French had created.
We have always fought wars discerning our use of power
Always
Most civilized countries do
Just because you have doesn’t mean you can use it
I agree we failed our troops in Indochina
No question
It will tell you everything that you could know about how our lack of strategy in Vietnam developed, beginning with blunders by Kennedy and most heavily with the utter deceitfulness of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
Johnson and McNamara had no intention of winning that war. The JCS told them before the first combat soldier was sent that it would be a major war taking a minimum of 500,000 troops and 5 years of hard fighting.
Johnson wanted nothing to interfere with his giant Great Society domestic programs so he was only willing to commit enough military effort to put on a "show of American resolve". This piecemeal, "graduated response" was designed by lawyers working for LBJ and it was the disaster that the military predicted it would be, allowing the North to ramp up their own efforts to match ours. It's all in the memos and Presidential papers that McMaster uncovered in his research.