[SauronOfMordor]

The US concentrated too much on "body counts". The Communists weren't that much concerned about bodies -- they had lots of cannon-fodder. What they DIDN'T have that much of was cash.

If the US had concentrated on economic targets (destroying the dikes in North Vietnam and ruining the rice harvest; taking out the warehouses in Haiphong; etc) and gotten the North too busy keeping its own people from starving to look for trouble down South, things might have been different

[Mom_Grandmother]

I agree. I'v got a question for anyone that would care to answer. All of the fighing seemed to be focused in South Vietnam, why. Would we today, if we declared war on North Vietnam, take it to North Vietnam, instead of killing the South. It was the South that wanted free of the North.

Now I certainly am no expert when it comes to war, but I would have knocked the he** out of the North. It was politics, right, all politics? Seems to me we were totally destroying the wrong part of Vietnam.

[Sci Fi Guy]

If the US had concentrated on economic targets (destroying the dikes in North Vietnam and ruining the rice harvest; taking out the warehouses in Haiphong; etc) and gotten the North too busy keeping its own people from starving to look for trouble down South, things might have been different

The biggest problem was president johnson micromanaging the war. He personally picked bombing targets. When the president has that much distain and mistrust of the military, there is no way the military could function. And when we did withdraw, we failed to support the South. So they were unprepared to fight alone.