“You don’t need to occupy in order to defeat.
We flew over 5,000,000 sorties into north Viet Nam..”
Where did you get that number? That would be over 1200 sorties per day for the entire period of the war, over the North, not the South, Laos, or Cambodia, ignoring periods of bad weather, and the long pause in bombing of the North from 1968-72.
“Defeat” and the collapse of the regime are two different things. To put in terms of the lefty worldview with which you are obviously familiar, did our government collapse after the defeat in Vietnam?
Please cite some facts to support your contention that our objective was to force a collapse of the NVN regime. (Strawmen and weasel words won’t do.)
Obviously my "lefty world view" tends to view "defeat" and "collapse" of a regime we're at war with as similar enough not to be that different.
OTOH, I was mistaken on the sorties flown over NVM. There was a total of 5.2 million sorties flown by our guys in the nVietnam war over the north & south.