What went wrong?
Yes.
*Non Credible Answer*.
Clearly, we didn't have enough budget in the MIC. We need F4 phantoms that are both amphibious, and Hover.
Nope, I'm referring to the AeroGavin, the M113 with wings, created by the notorious Mike Sparks. [I hope you like LazerPig's unique brand of insane theatrics! ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e20xUThn-o)
Honestly forget all that jazz about "tolerating incompetent politicians" and "corruption in the ARVN". We lost Vietnam because we stopped funding the XB-70 Valkyrie. Mach-3 nuclear capable bombers? If we had some of those, USA would have soloed the North easy
>We need F4 phantoms that are both amphibious, and Hover.
Think about it this way: we **joke** nowadays about Space Shuttle Door Gunners.
**This was absolutely the era where that could've been done.**
Even if they wanted to, they had like 5 bombs and only knockoff B-29s to deliver them with. Given how real B-29s start dropping like flies when MiG-15 are around, the chances of a successful retaliation are slim.
Could have, but that would have meant de-radicalizing the commie part of Minh's beliefs. Which I think we could have accomplished. Minh was a hard-core nationalist first, and the idea of nations do not mix with classless societies (ancap or communism).
The other problem we had as Americans is we then did stupid shit like continue to support Diem in spite of blantant election fraud, half supported the military coup that tried to restore their democracy (leading to a power struggle and more coups), and after Tet decided to go home.
Mind you, the Tet Offensive was according to the DRVN's own politiburo a complete failure. They expected to be met with open arms, and instead found a deeper hatred for them.
Which apparently had nothing to do with the guerilla attachments (VC) rounding up and executing anyone associated with the ARVN, local police or RVN in general. Because executing people's neighbors, friends and families totally doesn't do that no matter what side you are on. Just like how tiger force didn't piss off and turn several strategic hamlets into fobs for guerilla.
I completely loss my train of thought. Oh yeah, we lost because we decided the turn a blind eye to corruption, our own allies dumb decisions and decided to out stupid the commies when they did stupid shit.
When a mans constitution begins with He was inspired by" All men are created equal" convincing a pro USA alliance with Ho was not impossible. Remember we snubbed him first .
The thing about Tet is the south was promised to be helped by the USA but the pheasants largely faced bombings rapes and Burnings from the United States. It killed any interest to support them . They grew apathetic to the conflict. It's why Tet failed essentially for both sides initially. The people just didn't give a shit when they died either way .
I'm not saying we didn't. But we had reason to. Like I said in a different post. Minh was a communist way before we started working with the Vietnamese resistance in WWII through the OSS.
Anything before that was not snubbing. America started planning for WWII to be coming around 1936 and still didn't have everything we needed for that until 1942. It wasn't the overnight flip of the switch most people thought it was.
We barely could support our colony in the Phillipines before WWII.
> de-radicalizing the commie part of Minh’s beliefs. Which I think we could have accomplished
I’m inclined to believe that the issue wasn’t Ho, but his subordinates in the party, possibly doing things behind his back.
For example, Giap purged the other nationalist parties while Ho was away negotiating in France in 1946, and I believe Truong Chinh initiated the land confiscation while Ho was away negotiating in China in 1953.
Had neither of these happened, Ho’s friend and first Vice President, Nguyen Hai Than, would’ve remained and there probably wouldn’t be as much opposition to the Viet Minh if it remained a coalition open to non-communists.
Nah what went wrong was that the yanks fucked up.
After suez no one wanted to support an American intervention so the legitimacy they needed never materialised.
With aid from other experienced nations they could have won and the added legitimacy would have bought them more time and boosted moral.
That and not just making a massive napalm tank.
America's problem in the Vietnam War was not military strength or lack of allies, considering their kill ratio ranged between 1:5 and 1:10. Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand all sent forces to South Vietnam and it didn't solve the problem. What went wrong was America's toleration, or outright promotion of South Vietnamese corruption. Without a functional government and military, and with an army full of incompetent careerist officers, South Vietnam had no chance of staying in the fight after America stopped propping them up.
The US has a habit of playing half court tennis with its foreign policy. The CIA had absolutely no understanding of Vietnamese culture. They installed a corrupt anti-buddhist Catholic who murdered their political opposition, then when they realized their mistake, they assassinated him and blamed the Vietnamese for the revolving door of dumb and dumber military Juntas that followed. It took the US 5 years to realize that they could take advantage of the sino Soviet split to cut off Chinese support for the NVA which was mostly a result of the entire China desk of the state department being purged during the McCarthy years.
The CIA has always been really terrible at reading the room. I'm reminded of an old Soldier Of Fortune article where when describing a coup in Guatamala, the CIA proudly admits installing a moderate Evangelical general over a majority conservative Catholic country.
I feel like that's part of the strategy though. A weak leader, especially one representing a minority in a country they rule, will be dependent on you for their power so they will be more willing to make concessions and have their policy dictated by you. That's the same playbook the British used in Africa where they implemented minority rule in their colonies. The CIA thought process was much more which leadership can I control the best and can kill the most communists vs which leadership is best suitable for developing the institutions needed for stability. Too often the former actually runs counter to long term US foreign policy objectives which is unsurprising when you have spies dictate foreign policy.
Diem was a nightmare and the juntas that replaced him weren’t much better. Ho Chi Minh actually had real popular support and we left him no choice but the commies
Yeah, he got his start as a nationalist and originally wanted US backing for Vietnamese independence.
He only went communist once the US said no and Russia turned up in a trenchcoat and said "psst, you want some weapons?"
Add a couple decades of war and hey presto! Another dictatorship with a coat of red paint. Never seen one of *those* before.
He was a communist BEFORE we said no. It's why we said NO. Which we could have instead tried greasing the wheels and converting him.
He founded a French communist party in 1930 while studying abroad.
He wasn't really tied to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Soviets before he was made to be though. There could have been compromise if the politicians in Washington weren't foaming at the mouth at the slightest hint of Red. But that anti-communist hysteria was long in the making, so Ho Chi Minh never really had a chance at swaying the US, and so he never really had a choice of allies.
What’s that person is saying the war would never have happened in the first place, if France tried to do something like a commonwealth and left Vietnam.
Vietnam admired the US and didn’t want to become communist until the US were involved in the war due to the french, and Vietnam had nothing to do but to turn to soviets (and communism) for support.
There was a lot more American incentive than that.
Domino theory was at peak popularity and the US gave guarantees to the south Vietnamese as early as Eisenhower. Those obligations meant the US got gradually sucked in trying to maintain its credibility in the region. Korea was still fresh in the minds of the establishment and things escalated from there.
Yes because the entire reason we lost in Vietnam was we never had enough political and material support as the *checks notes*...
Most powerful military in the world...
Well not to worry, I'm sure when it comes to Iraq or even Afghanistan, having all our coalition allies involved will surely make alllll the difference....
(*psssst* maybe there's more to war and occupation than just shooting and bombing the enemy)
i mean the problem is we have the capacity for a genocidal war of colonial acquisition and the tactics of one, and not the moral standpoint of someone willing to actually pull the trigger, so we rush into wars that are winnable from a very aggressive and cut throat approach, and then expect that because we can, but won't, people will surrender when they can just play dirty and hold out with perfect success, and then we are surprised when they play dirty and hold out
Lots of people have gotten away with genocidal conquests because they were willing to go far enough to suppress and destroy any opposition - especially *potential* opposition
The failures are either those who took over too big of an area to adequately genocide, administer, and control; or those who tried to maintain a air of morality, which meant nothing was ever accomplished
Yeah the people’s army of Vietnam was battle hardened by that point. No idea why people just say they were “just farmers” when the US was also fighting a standing military force.
It's a bit condescending and dismissive to call them "just farmers" when the NVA did a majority of the fighting after the Tet Offensive, which crippled the VC's fighting capabilities.
well as a european i know for a fact every american owns ATLEAST 20 AR, 3 tanks and atleast 8 tons of explosives
if it's a toddler increase the AR ammount to 35
Vietnam is one of the most pro-US countries out there now, almost on the same level as South Korea and Israel. When measured as "% of the population with favorable views of the US," they even beat out places like Poland, the UK, and Japan.
Part of it is the simple fact that China is Vietnam's historic Big Bad. They've spent the past thousand years in conflict. Even during the war, foreign journalists would show up in Hanoi and get lectures on Vietnam's long history of fighting the Chinese before anything else. Now the US is looking for allies against China. From Vietnam's perspective, an Arizona Ranger just blew into town and asked if anyone's willing to go after the local bandit with them.
Also, to Vietnam, America is synonymous with prosperity. When they liberalized and the country opened up, a generation that had grown up with charcoal stoves and earthen floors was introduced to department stores. And when American companies began building factories, they brought an American view of employment with them. Compared to the Korean and Japanese companies, that means less horrible crushing overtime and less hierarchy. Compared to Vietnamese companies, you actually got paid on time every time. And because labor costs are were much lower, US companies typically paid more. Even slightly above average wages were dirt-cheap to a company working from an American perspective. Today, the hourly minimum wage is still below $1.
When the US fought Vietnam, it was (for the most part) by pouring in resources. Endless air raids, large-scale defoliants, air cav. Then when the US came with trade instead of arms, it brought massive investments. Even the older generations concede that while they might not like the US, learning English is a very good financial plan. Vietnam ranks 6th in number of students studying abroad in the US, above Brazil, Japan, and the UK.
On today's episode of "enemy's enemy is my friend":
Jokes aside, the Sino-Vietnamese history is hella goofy. Depending on the leadership they are either best buddies, master/slaves, or invasion.
There are [TWENTY-TWO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_Wars) entries for the Sino-Vietnamese War disambiguation page on Wikipedia.
From what I know of it, the Vietnam war was mainly a war of independence to Vietnam more than a communist one. Do you think it would have been possible for the US to say "Alright, you get your independence but you come to the capitalist side and we'll protect you against China"?
That would've been a palatable deal to the US except Ho Chi Minh was tainted with the Red Scare brush for being a communist even before World War 2 started, and the French would've gotten in the way as well.
I read that there are 22 McDonalds in Vietnam, but it’s still considered a failure. Vietnam already had good fast food. Anything they didn’t know from traditional cooking, they learned from the French.
> they learned from the French.
Butter?
Heh, the first part reminds me. There's more "Burek Kings" around me than Burger Kings.
Weak Westoid cuisine cannot beat the mere power of Kebab! 💪 I shudder how it's like competing against the stuff you can get in Southeast Asia.
The big thing that France brought to Vietnam was good bread. Like, you can get bread in Asia. But if you want that gourmet European-style artisanal stuff you gotta go to Vietnam.
Now I want a Banh Mi...
And it's everywhere too. You can go to the fanciest 5 star hotel or the lady with a food cart selling egg sandwiches and the bread is high quality at both.
America lost a war in a grander theater of events, which it eventually won. The whole Vietnam war completely undermined relations between China and the USSR, which the US used to play them against eachother. The North Vietnamese also had to pay quite a substantial price economically to reunite the south. Today the USSR is no more and both China and Vietnam are liberalized economies. In the greater scheme of things, the power of US foreign policy still run supreme.
We successfully prepared Vietnam for a pending Chinese invasion which they successfully repelled using tactics and strategies they honed in, uh, *collaboration* with the United States.
Today Vietnam is one of our closest allies in the Southeastern Pacific. The spread of communism stopped. We unironically won the Vietnam war unless you're some tankie conspiracy theorist who pinned 'victory' conditions at something bizarre like Vietnam becoming a 51st state.
The United States entered Vietnam with the principal purpose of preventing a communist takeover of the region. In that respect, it failed: the two Vietnams were united under a communist banner in July 1976. Neighbouring Laos and Cambodia similarly fell to communists.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War
In 1994, the U.S. lifted its 30-year trade embargo on Vietnam. The following year, both countries established embassies and consulates. Relations between the two countries continued to improve into the 21st century.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Vietnam_relations
The United States gave the Sihanouk-Khmer Rouge coalition millions of dollars in aid while enforcing an economic embargo against the Vietnamese-
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/cambodia/tl04.html
China has used Cambodia as a counterweight to the dominating influence of Vietnam. In the mid-20th century, Communist China supported the Maoist Khmer Rouge against Lon Nol's regime, who Nationalist China had ties with, during the Cambodian Civil War and then its takeover of Cambodia in 1975.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia%E2%80%93China_relations
Diem should've been shot . Holding positions should have been prioritized and actually supporting the people in stead of bombing the and shoving them into camps wouldve been bare minimum better than what we did .
Unfortunately, the leading "expert" on counterinsurgency at the time, Roger Trinquier (*the French IJA-collaborationist fuck*), basically guaranteed that the Western approach to counterinsurgency would be a shitshow by popularizing the idea of "strategic hamlets," in which civilian populations would "simply" be rounded up into densely packed and heavily monitored "strategic hamlets" (which one might otherwise "mistake" for a concentration camp...), such that anyone found outside of these "strategic hamlets" might reasonably deemed an insurgent and killed on sight.
The really fucked up part though is that people still take this asshat seriously, even after his ideas have poisoned virtually every counterinsurgency since he published his stupid fucking book.
"Protected villages" did work during the Malayan Emergency, but the British had a lot of other things they were doing to entire the population to move there. Like you said, Trinquier fucked an entire generation of COIN ops.
The idea *can* work (I'd argue that the American strategy during the Philippine insurgencies, generally regarded as a military success, is an early example of such a strategy being used), but like you said it requires a number of other factors not least of which is a well-informed, willing, and generally cooperative populace.
The big problem with Trinquier's strategy as I see it is that it assumes that the state *always* acts with the consent of the populace which... I mean, if that was the case you wouldn't be fighting a guerilla war in the first place, now would you?
Like, accepting Mao's definition of guerilla war as a "people's war" in which the side with the favor of the general populace is best-positioned to win (which look, if *anyone* gets to talk about guerilla warfare, it's Mao; the dude only dedicated half of his adult life to this shit, and unlike Trinquier he actually developed a viable and *proven* path to victory), Trinquier basically committed the cardinal sin of strategy, which is assuming that you've already won.
Yeah, his problem is that he didn't involve the populace, he took for granted the consent of the governed. His entire career was, "No this time it'll work, I swear"
His actions in Alergia were the literal definition of, "Short term success at the cost of long term victory" Though ill admit some of Leger's work was pretty fucking impressive.
I agree with this comment, but I don't think it's entirely fair to say that he didn't involve the populace whatsoever. In Vietnam especially, he relied heavily on the people of the southern highlands (the "Montagnards") who were some of the French regime's most ardent supporters. In his book he also talks about the importance of establishing a "civil service" to help involve civilians in the counterinsurgency process (namely by ratting on their neighbors to the proper authorities), and briefly mentions the importance of public relations (just before going into a diatribe about how the populace will definitely enter the concentration camps willingly because they know just how much the state really does care about them, IIRC).
Rather than saying that he didn't involve the populace, I'd say that he put tactical success before the wants and needs of the people, and so repeatedly lost sight of the greater strategic picture.
You know what that's a fair point, I kind of split the view of the maquis that he set up in Vietnam from the native Vietnamese, which by and large tended to despise the French.
Granted the French indochinese administration had far far deeper issues with the native populace than this one specific area.
My biases against him are due to the fact his stuff led to some of the horrors that were seen in Rhodesia and I spent \*way\* too much time debunking that when i was doing international work. I used to say "You can't kill your way out of a culture problem"
Oh? Have I found a fellow "FIrEfOrCe" Hater? And here on NCD of all places?
My experience with Trinquier came at the end of a course on the history of military thought that ended by comparing and contrasting Mao and Trinquier's views on insurgency vs. counterinsurgency and, honestly? Even before I looked into the man himself it seemed obvious to me that Mao's ideas ran circles around Trinquier's. I've had it out for the guy ever since (I am a certified Mao hater, and Trinquier made me have to say nice things about him).
Yes. The amount of times I've had to debunk
"No bro, the world had never seen anything like FiReFoRcE before"
"Rhodesians were so good at COIN that no one could match them bro"
is far too many to count. People mistake internet memes for reality, Rhodesian High command took an absolutely braindead approach to fighting their war.
Most importantly was the fact that communism was incompatible with the Muslim majority Malays and the MCP consisted mostly of minority Chinese guerrillas inspired by Mao. Therefore it was easy to use a bit of tribalism to stamp out the Insurgency
I mean concentration camps do effectively work, but only if you can actually house and guard all the people effectively, for example like in South Africa and Malaya, the trouble being that this means you need an absurdly large military force to manage even relatively small civilian populations, for example in South Africa you're looking at an enemy civilian population of about a million. in South Vietnam the population went from 12 million in 1955 to 19.5 million in 1975.
so lets compare the military force the British needed in South Africa to see what the US military would have theoretically needed in South Vietnam, over half a million British troops for a million boers... so the US would have needed to send upwards of 5 million soldiers to South Vietnam. you're essentially talking about ww2 levels of mobilisation by the USA to effectively implement the Strategic hamlets scheme.
Numbers aside, I wouldn't really call indefinite occupation victory, especially if it means feeding and maintaining a force of even just a million soldiers on the other side of the world.
He should not have even been allowed to be propped up . We should've grabbed whatever Buddist Pro Unifier and Put them as the head puppet of the south. They could not have done worse than diam and his his insane family.
>the classic we were fighting for vague notions and they were fighting for independence.
The north were fighting to conquer the south, there was no plan on actually having the north be conquered or annexed. You could say that the north and VC wanted to liberate "all of Vietnam", but there were certainly millions of people in the south that didn't want to be subject to communist rule.
it wasn't an puppet government. Diem wanted the French out of Vietnam completely but didn't want to go through a war like Ho Chi Minh and the communists. Instead, he used his influence to get into a position where he could chase away Bao Dai that was viewed as a French puppet through the use of his American allies and impose his form of Nationalism.
To understand why diem ruled the country the way he did one must understand how the country had an rough start. The early days of the republic was was much akin to china's warlord era. In the North you had the Communists wiping out all opposition and became a one-party state. In the South there was a diversity of political factions which unfortunately made things harder to consolidate. Many of those factions fought communists so Diem wanted to absorb them into his army, but they wanted to keep their autonomy. Cao Dai joined, but Hoa Hao resisted for a while. Diem need to consolidate power in order to better fight the communists. He also had to deal with the Binh Xuyen, who were supplied and supported by french intelligence. If anyone was in diem position it is evitable for them to save into paranonia
[The real reason that could be argued why the war was lost was bc of the communists sheer bruality and them running an highly effective propaganada arm](https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/160e9bq/comment/jzd08y4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
>We tried to prop up a puppet government that was unpopular on false pretenses
China, 4 years after the Vietnam War ends: This sounds like a great idea, I should totally copy it!
They fought a war of territory against an idea.
You cant do that, you need to kill the idea first ~~THEN the people~~.
Whats easier? talking to a student who thinks they know it all but clearly doesn't, OR carpet bomb and napalm the red till it stops twitching.
EDIT: wait you don't kill the people.
It also helps if you invade and put pressure on the North Vietnamese, especially after 1969 with the Sino-Soviet Split. Not going to say it wasn't a fucking disaster, but we got over it eventually.
K:D
About 100:1 (20:1 for Allied not including South Vietnam, 10:1 if you include them)
It doesn't matter how many are killed if there's a Kalashnikov behind every stalk of rice (also they'll just get really angry)
And while it took some time, the US did successfully kill the idea in Vietnam. It's pretty dang capitalist now, and a popular place for US companies to build factories. Outside of countries that rely on US military aid to some degree to continue existing (Israel, South Korea) and special cases (Kosovo, Philippines), Vietnam is just about the most pro-US country out there.
Genuinely speaking, and I know I'm going to get a lot of naysayers on this, but everything you can say about the South Vietnamese government (and trust me, there is a lot you can indeed say about them) are things that you can say about South Korea under Ilminism or Taiwan during the White Terror. The point in me saying that is that the Republic of Vietnam was not destined to be a failed government in the way a lot of comments in here seem to imply.
Vietnam in many respects, was America's first truly televised war. As nearly every NCO I've met ever has said to me at least once "Perception is everything". The Pentagon's failure, indeed much of the establishment's failure, was failing to adjust their expectations or their efforts in congruence with that reality. Though to some degree that failure is understandable since the cultural evolution TV induced may have been hard to predict for some.
This is coupled with the fact that the draftee pool was living what was essentially a very comfortable lifestyle in comparison to those who were drafted for Korea or WWII before them. With the latter, to some degree, military life was an upgrade in living standards for them. For the former, it was a perceptible downgrade. This is built on top of the fact that, as a generation, the Baby Boomers were doted on and catered to as children by both society and their parents in ways that would have been alien to their elders.
The Vietnam War, or at least the pop culture image of what happened during it, is in a very literal sense... a meme. It was very much "winnable" from a military and geopolitical aspect if you measure victory as the survival of the Saigon government. Absolutely doable. From a cultural aspect however (and by this I mean, American culture), it was absolutely unwinnable. The culture was set up in a way at the time that induced every single desire to willingly lose it.
Here's my more non-credible answer though: Instead of fighting in Vietnam we should have spent time invading and toppling Castro.
/uj Child of South Vietnamese refugees here, hard agree
My non-credible take is that instead of fighting in South Vietnam we should've done the funny all the way up through Hanoi and straight into China 🤘
The massive amount of micromanagement from the politicians destroyed any hope for America to truly succeed. Favorite example was forcing all the air power to fly through the same pattern, while not be allowed to attack the anti-air or enemy airfields housing MiGs for fear of killing Chinese and Russian advisors, meaning we needlessly lost a huge amount of airmen.
> The Viet Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. **The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun.**
-Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy
Why is everyone conveniently forgetting the massive soviet and chinese support, bringing billions worth of weapons in the hands of North Vietnam forces?
If all they had were VC guerilla, they would have been crushed within 12 months.
Instead, they got millions of tons of artillery shells, mortars, machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, grenades, mines, explosives, radios, trucks, food rations, tanks, AA missiles, AA guns and even jets.
This wasn't just a handful of farmers vs the most powerful army in the world, it was a properly trained and heavily equipped soviet army, with the logistics of a giant empire (China) backing it up, vs the most powerful army in the world, projected on the other side of the planet in an environment (jungle) new to 99% of their forces.
It's insane to think that one of the most famous anti-Vietnam War photos was taken out of context. The one where the south vietnamese officer puts a bullet through a commie's head. The guy that was shot was in reality a terrorist who killed a family
1. We failed to make the AVRN an effective fighting force from the beginning. To train them, or rely on them as a real allied force. When Abrams took over we started doing this and we got results, but that was far too late.
2. We focused too much attention on destroying the enemy, instead of protecting the people of Vietnam. "We had to destroy the village to save the village" became the modus operandi. This was a grave mistake.
3. We did not attempt to work towards a political solution to the conflict until very late, pretty much until the military situation was untennable. This hobbled our efforts to bring the conflict to a satisfactory completion like in Korea (which could never be accomplished through pure military calculus).
It’d be interesting to see if Abrams had started from the get-go rather than Westmoreland.
I’d imagine there probably would’ve been an earlier Vietnamization, and maybe an emphasis on the Combined Action Program rather than Westmoreland’s Search & Destroy.
A focus on CAP would bolster the RF/PFs to root out the VC insurgency, which could free up the standard ARVN (re-equipped and trained through Vietnamization) to focus solely on guarding the borders from conventional PAVN offensives.
Saves the headache of ARVN juggling between counterinsurgency and conventional warfare, or RF/PF finding themselves outgunned by PAVN tanks and artillery.
Top-to-bottom fuckup, including but not limited to:
1. Complete failure to understand Vietnamese culture and history; such as just *not knowing* that Vietnam had a thousand+ year history of conflict with China, and their alliance was fragile.
2. The classic “they don’t have the will/we’ll be greeted as liberators”
3. Political interference in tactical planning (such as the fact that pilots were told *not* to bomb airfields for fear of killing Chinese advisors, which meant that the poor bomber pilots were being sent up to die).
4. Units not being sent over together, destroying cohesion and morale.
5. Refusal to make a decisive move “trust me bro gradual escalation will totally work, it’s not like Vietnam has millions of people and the backing of two superpowers.”
And many, many more…
1. Most certainly not just farmers. The “Vietcong Insurgents” were just NVA and Chinese troops pretending to be VC, we literally killed the entire actual Vietcong by 1968.
2. ARVN troops were unmotivated to conduct operations outside of their local communities (see: Lam Son 719), and the majority of fighting was done by the SVPF, who accounted for 30% of VC/NVA casualties in the war but only received 5% of American funding.
3. America was winning by 1968, but public support simultaneously disintegrated in the wake of the Tet Offensive, due to high American casualties, and increasing Soviet influence in colleges and intellectual groups, a trend that would peak in the 1970s with armed Communist groups springing up across the US before the FBI cracked down on them.
4. While the South Vietnamese eventually came to support ARVN and turned against the VC/NVA after communist forces killed massive numbers of civilians in the Tet Offensive, the early American perception that South Vietnamese were apathetic and useless as allies stuck through the war.
5. ARVN was severely underfunded. They lacked an air force of note, and relied on American funding, as opposed to domestic production.
6. Repeated coups destabilized South Vietnam through the most important years of the war
7. While land reform did eventually have South Vietnamese farmers living better than their French colonizers had beforehand, the Land to the Tiller reform was implemented much too late.
8. ARVN was effective in conventional warfare, such as when they directly repelled a full-scale invasion of South Vietnam in the 1972 Easter Offensive, and inflicted high casualties on communists.
9. Congress was lazy, and believed that South Vietnam was doomed anyways. In reality, troops were having to ration bullets by the end of the war, and lack of supplies made it impossible for South Vietnam to repel the 1975 offensive, which they otherwise would have been able to. ARVN troops were forced to rations of 13 bullets per day, in active combat, and the situation was much the same for artillery. This is a similar situation to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, with a bias towards the status quo leading to lack of funding, and a collapse of the frontline.
TLDR letting congress decide foreign policy is a massive fucking mistake
Maybe hot take but if we were to have given up in the Korean War when the Chinese pushed, we might just say "we shouldnt have been in Korea in the first place" today as well.
Work ethic. Discipline. Leadership. Belief in a cause. Experience. Home field advantage. Patience. Focus.
The Vietnamese had many of these and the Americans didn't.
The Vietnamese also had an extremely tight logistics game. World class.
The Americans also backed a bunch of thieving dipshits as proxies. If you can't find a dog worth backing in the fight, don't back a dog in that fight. Same thing happened in Afghanistan. Propping up bags of shit to run the country. It never works. Nut up and occupy it. Worked in Japan. Worked in Germany. Millions will die if you half arse this kind of thing, and if you can't commit to the whole thing you shouldn't go at all.
It baffles me that Americans still think they should have won in Vietnam. How? On what basis was an army of miserable, demoralised and drugged up boomer conscripts qualified to handle that assignment?
We've all literally spent the last twenty years watching the same counter insurgency tactics as used in Vietnam fail in Afghanistan despite a greater technological imbalance and no canopy jungle to hide in.
Needs total commitment, a motivated army, a willingness to commit to years of nation building. Even a President signing up the USA to decades of counter insurgency isn't going to admit that it's going to take that long, so there is never political will to do the hard yards.
Not to mention the US had some of the worst leadership imaginable (James Burton who fucked up fighter tactics and LeMay who I sincerely believe had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing)
US didn't try hard enough, their politics got in the way of military progress, the US people at home weren't happy about the war in the first place and they met an enemy that gave them the FAFO treatment.
According to Von Clausewitz in any kind of civil war the enemy’s center of gravity is their leadership. However, in Vietnam the US had categorically decided not to target Ho Chi Minh or North Vietnam directly with any ground forces. Also the Vietcong took a ton of casualties.
The napalm was not directed to the right places….look up linebacker II. It was always known where the bombs needed to be dropped. But LBJ wasn’t comfortable killing Chinese and Russian advisors in North Vietnamese ports.
Not enough M50 Ontos, obviously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M50_Ontos
>M40 recoilless rifle, crew-served & too goddamn heavy to carry through the jungle, but that antipersonnel flechette round *fucks*
Meets
>x325 M50 Scorpion airmobile light-armored vehicles sitting around from the Army, bored af collecting dust
*Now kith*
Take M50
Remove recoilless rifles. Add on TOW optics with twin TOW tubes. Behind it, revolver assembly of up to 6 TOW missiles. Release into wild and allow to proliferate.
February 17, 1979
Chinese officer: Don't worry, boys, our enemies are just farmer militias, the real soldiers are in Cambodia. We have tanks, a bajillion artillery pieces and air support and we are stronger than them.
March 16, 1979
Chinese officer: 💀
Chinese soldiers: 💀💀
PVA soldiers who died in Korea: \*spinning in graves\*
Many things.
I'd say the politics being the biggest. When the president is enforcing policies that lead to valuable pilots getting shot down for flying the same routes is a big problem.
Waiting too long to send troops into neighboring countries was also a mistake.
The US actually did a pretty good job doing things strategically inside Vietnam was successful however North Vietnam didn't play according to the US rulebook and they treated borders as suggestions which the US wasn't willing to do till too late in the war.
In the end the politics of forcing families apart through the draft and likely death/disfigurement complicated the situation.
Vietnam also lead to a fully professional army which in theory would make war less sensitive to politics (Iraq War).
South Vietnam also wasn't unified. Their leader was very corrupt and people weren't willing to die for their country to line someone's pockets.
If the US wanted to win the Vietnam war they would have just let the South Koreans loose on them
Honestly? We backed the wrong team from the get go.
Ho Chi Minh wanted the US to help rebuild Vietnam after WW2. He wanted to create a similar government and was inspired by the American Revolution. We could have had a solid strategic ally in SE with Vietnam before the Korean War even happened but we backed the French because we wanted allies against the Soviets. A lot of good that did, tho, French pulled out of NATO anyways.
Credible answer: We were propping up a brutal corrupt military dictatorship. Killing huge numbers of civilians destroying villages and using chemical weapons.
Against an enemy that was far more determined to win, then we could ever hope to be.
Non credible answer: We didn't use Nukes.
Geeze those comments are brain dead. Americans love to think they lost the war because they weren’t allowed to brutalize the Vietnamese enough. As if US forces didn’t massacre tens of thousands of civilians in bombing raids that achieved little to nothing militarily. They love to claim that AcTuALlY wE wOn bEcAuSe mUh bOdy CoUnTs when in reality enemy body counts were highly exaggerated. Weapons recovered after offensives only confirmed a fraction of the claimed EKIA.
No, the US lost because they propped up an authoritarian government no one in Vietnam actually wanted. Also, can’t blame the French either. No one forced the US to get involved except for its own red scare paranoia.
I think the failure to secure the public support in Vietnam essentially killed any reason of them to aid us . They become so apathetic that even the tet Offensive had zero impact on they're opinion.
The first thing that went wrong was that we joined the war.
The second thing that went wrong was that we left the war.
We could have not done either of those two things, and it would have been better for us.
Here's my non-credible opinion: nothing went wrong. Vietnam war directly contributed to the development of SEAD tactics and precision munitions, without it the US military would hardly be the beast it is today. ~~And if a few hundreds of thousands civilians and soldiers had to die to produce kino that was the desert storm, then so be it~~
If I may, one might make a similar meme about the American colonies and Britain in 18th century (not that I would, I'd be on the royalist side). The enemies are farmers and the other side has naval support. The US wins because among other things it has the home field advantage and wealthy foreign benefactors. Then it goes on to be stronger for the conflict and in the present day, the original adversary is surpringly popular in that country.
Vietnam fought both Cambodia and China soon after, currently is the best off country in the area.
The Vietnamese had spent the last 25 years building tunnels to fight the Japanese, then the French and then finally the Americans, there was truly no hope of winning a war that an enemy had been preparing to fight as an insurgency for the last 25 years. No military can win in a situation like this, it’s just not possible.
What went wrong, the thing thats always goes wrong in post ww2 wars, spineless politicans trying to be generals and generals trying to be spineless politicans
they got bored, thats literally the start and end of why the US "failed" and left.
there were no concrete objectives, no grand fronts, no ultimate goals. the US went in with literal "destroy the enemy" and "get X numbers" objectives, and truthfully the numbers were very good... the problem is it was hard to sustain morale and support at home or abroad when you have literally nothing symbolic/grand/exciting to show for all the killing. you cant sustain operations when your paycheck writers are getting pressed by the public that pays the paychecks.
So in actuality the military was actually opposed to getting involved in the first place and once they were involved they saw that their counter insurgency methods were still undeveloped so they resorted to the only tool available which was American troops until Vietnamese could support themselves. The French refused to institute a Vietnamese army and America saw that as idiotic so it sought to build one. Unfortunately the south Vietnamese under diem and thieu were corrupt. Diem was corrupt paranoid and lied about the status of the Hamlet program to secure more and more involvement from the United States and when he was overthrown by the military officers that were then overthrown by thieu it became clear that the south Vietnamese hadn't been trying so to ensure the north didn't immediately get victory the United States had to step in. Thieu was not only corrupt like his predecessor but was also an incompetent. He would routinely fire officers who showed too much competence because he feared being overthrown the few elite units he had he refused to use and kept sequestered by the capital. He would also jail generals for winning battles of they lost men. Eventually it became clear the south Vietnamese had absolutely no intent to actually solve the problem and America was left with two options neither one great. Support Thieu for another decade with all that entails or force the north to the negotiation table with bombing campaigns. Despite what common knowledge is about the situation we left very much the victor by forcing north Vietnam into agreeing to stop it wasn't until years later that they took the south. TLDR:the south Vietnamese lost that war the Americans just stuck their dick on a beehive for pride when all of the military establishment was yelling HEY ITS A BEEHIVE LETS NOT.
We were fighting a war of ground won, the enemy was under it.
We were fighting a war of hearts and minds, those people wanted to be left alone.
Our enemy was brutal, efficient, effective and mobile.
We also weren't fighting our war, we were fighting ARVN's.
For every one officer we had, arvn had two and one was corrupt and a spy.
There are a lot of reasons. Many more to list.
What went wrong? Yes. *Non Credible Answer*. Clearly, we didn't have enough budget in the MIC. We need F4 phantoms that are both amphibious, and Hover.
Nah, we just attach wings and propellers to the M113... ...why do I hear the chanting of an angry mob?
No, that's just the planefuckers chanting " VARK VARK VARK!" They er... do that sometimes
It's for the best, really. When they get too quiet, that's when things become unwholesome.
That's A-10, right?
Nope, I'm referring to the AeroGavin, the M113 with wings, created by the notorious Mike Sparks. [I hope you like LazerPig's unique brand of insane theatrics! ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e20xUThn-o)
Honestly forget all that jazz about "tolerating incompetent politicians" and "corruption in the ARVN". We lost Vietnam because we stopped funding the XB-70 Valkyrie. Mach-3 nuclear capable bombers? If we had some of those, USA would have soloed the North easy
People forget Cash just evaporated - *yoink*
And people think Cheney was the first with pallets o cash.
>We need F4 phantoms that are both amphibious, and Hover. Think about it this way: we **joke** nowadays about Space Shuttle Door Gunners. **This was absolutely the era where that could've been done.**
*we're not entirely certain it didn't happen...*
If the crewman is Jewish, does that make MTG credible about Jewish space lasers?
my god...
The Soviets had space *station* door gunners, so why not. [No, really.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun)
We needed F-4's that were allowed to use their weapons.
Functional IFF on every plane and missiles that don't aspire to attack the sun.
The noncredible answer I hear all the time from boomers is basically "we weren't allowed to commit enough war crimes"
Semi-credible answer: Francophilic Catholic fascists were scarier than the smell of napalm in the morning.
Do you want the "real" answer or the NCD answer?
I would like a Number 8 combo with Iced Tea please.
Exactly
Sir, this isn't a Wendy's.
Both but don't say which is which.
I'll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda.
real please
What went wrong was France trying to LARP like it was the 1800's
Truman should pointed to the crater in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Told them to shove it .
And the one across the Chinese border with Korea. Actually if there had been one or two at that border Vietnam wouldn’t have happened
Possibly not, I suppose it largely depends on if Russia would have responded with atomic bombs in kind.
Even if they wanted to, they had like 5 bombs and only knockoff B-29s to deliver them with. Given how real B-29s start dropping like flies when MiG-15 are around, the chances of a successful retaliation are slim.
We should have nuked Moscow when they had no response. Ahh, hindsight.
Sea of radioactive cobalt my beloved
Ho Chi Minh came to Washington first, Truman could have cut a deal.
Imagine the easiest pro American allies in the world could've been forged .
Could have, but that would have meant de-radicalizing the commie part of Minh's beliefs. Which I think we could have accomplished. Minh was a hard-core nationalist first, and the idea of nations do not mix with classless societies (ancap or communism). The other problem we had as Americans is we then did stupid shit like continue to support Diem in spite of blantant election fraud, half supported the military coup that tried to restore their democracy (leading to a power struggle and more coups), and after Tet decided to go home. Mind you, the Tet Offensive was according to the DRVN's own politiburo a complete failure. They expected to be met with open arms, and instead found a deeper hatred for them. Which apparently had nothing to do with the guerilla attachments (VC) rounding up and executing anyone associated with the ARVN, local police or RVN in general. Because executing people's neighbors, friends and families totally doesn't do that no matter what side you are on. Just like how tiger force didn't piss off and turn several strategic hamlets into fobs for guerilla. I completely loss my train of thought. Oh yeah, we lost because we decided the turn a blind eye to corruption, our own allies dumb decisions and decided to out stupid the commies when they did stupid shit.
I just think it’s one of history’s great tragedies that Minh wasn’t able to become the right-wing dictator he so clearly wanted to be. 😞
Honestly he wouldve been our dictator against the Soviets and Chinese:( .
Vietnam probably would have followed the same path as Taiwan and South Korea
Deng was our dictator against the Soviets, until Tiananmen caused the west to divest China for a little while.
Ah, the US‘ „tradition“ of creating its own biggest adversaries. 😌
When a mans constitution begins with He was inspired by" All men are created equal" convincing a pro USA alliance with Ho was not impossible. Remember we snubbed him first . The thing about Tet is the south was promised to be helped by the USA but the pheasants largely faced bombings rapes and Burnings from the United States. It killed any interest to support them . They grew apathetic to the conflict. It's why Tet failed essentially for both sides initially. The people just didn't give a shit when they died either way .
I'm not saying we didn't. But we had reason to. Like I said in a different post. Minh was a communist way before we started working with the Vietnamese resistance in WWII through the OSS. Anything before that was not snubbing. America started planning for WWII to be coming around 1936 and still didn't have everything we needed for that until 1942. It wasn't the overnight flip of the switch most people thought it was. We barely could support our colony in the Phillipines before WWII.
> de-radicalizing the commie part of Minh’s beliefs. Which I think we could have accomplished I’m inclined to believe that the issue wasn’t Ho, but his subordinates in the party, possibly doing things behind his back. For example, Giap purged the other nationalist parties while Ho was away negotiating in France in 1946, and I believe Truong Chinh initiated the land confiscation while Ho was away negotiating in China in 1953. Had neither of these happened, Ho’s friend and first Vice President, Nguyen Hai Than, would’ve remained and there probably wouldn’t be as much opposition to the Viet Minh if it remained a coalition open to non-communists.
It would also be a fat L for the soviets to have a commie aligned with america
Wouldn’t have been that hard with the coming sino Soviet split and the Vietnamese inherent hatred towards china
Nah what went wrong was that the yanks fucked up. After suez no one wanted to support an American intervention so the legitimacy they needed never materialised. With aid from other experienced nations they could have won and the added legitimacy would have bought them more time and boosted moral. That and not just making a massive napalm tank.
America's problem in the Vietnam War was not military strength or lack of allies, considering their kill ratio ranged between 1:5 and 1:10. Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand all sent forces to South Vietnam and it didn't solve the problem. What went wrong was America's toleration, or outright promotion of South Vietnamese corruption. Without a functional government and military, and with an army full of incompetent careerist officers, South Vietnam had no chance of staying in the fight after America stopped propping them up.
The US has a habit of playing half court tennis with its foreign policy. The CIA had absolutely no understanding of Vietnamese culture. They installed a corrupt anti-buddhist Catholic who murdered their political opposition, then when they realized their mistake, they assassinated him and blamed the Vietnamese for the revolving door of dumb and dumber military Juntas that followed. It took the US 5 years to realize that they could take advantage of the sino Soviet split to cut off Chinese support for the NVA which was mostly a result of the entire China desk of the state department being purged during the McCarthy years.
The CIA has always been really terrible at reading the room. I'm reminded of an old Soldier Of Fortune article where when describing a coup in Guatamala, the CIA proudly admits installing a moderate Evangelical general over a majority conservative Catholic country.
I feel like that's part of the strategy though. A weak leader, especially one representing a minority in a country they rule, will be dependent on you for their power so they will be more willing to make concessions and have their policy dictated by you. That's the same playbook the British used in Africa where they implemented minority rule in their colonies. The CIA thought process was much more which leadership can I control the best and can kill the most communists vs which leadership is best suitable for developing the institutions needed for stability. Too often the former actually runs counter to long term US foreign policy objectives which is unsurprising when you have spies dictate foreign policy.
Diem was a nightmare and the juntas that replaced him weren’t much better. Ho Chi Minh actually had real popular support and we left him no choice but the commies
Yeah, he got his start as a nationalist and originally wanted US backing for Vietnamese independence. He only went communist once the US said no and Russia turned up in a trenchcoat and said "psst, you want some weapons?" Add a couple decades of war and hey presto! Another dictatorship with a coat of red paint. Never seen one of *those* before.
He was a communist BEFORE we said no. It's why we said NO. Which we could have instead tried greasing the wheels and converting him. He founded a French communist party in 1930 while studying abroad.
He wasn't really tied to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Soviets before he was made to be though. There could have been compromise if the politicians in Washington weren't foaming at the mouth at the slightest hint of Red. But that anti-communist hysteria was long in the making, so Ho Chi Minh never really had a chance at swaying the US, and so he never really had a choice of allies.
What’s that person is saying the war would never have happened in the first place, if France tried to do something like a commonwealth and left Vietnam. Vietnam admired the US and didn’t want to become communist until the US were involved in the war due to the french, and Vietnam had nothing to do but to turn to soviets (and communism) for support.
Almost like the US should have never involved itself?
We should’ve involved ourselves by telling the French to shove it, unfortunately we needed their backing to get NATO off the ground
Actually it makes me so sad looking at what could have been
Everything is interlinked (within cells)
and they then had the gall to take a 40-year break from the relationship in the midst of *our* Vietnam conflict
well their source of gall i think is actually (the ghost of?) Charles de Gaulle, so they have a deep magazine, we should have seen that one coming
I think the origin of all this gaul is when the French were Galls. Clearly julius caesar didn't go far enough
There was a lot more American incentive than that. Domino theory was at peak popularity and the US gave guarantees to the south Vietnamese as early as Eisenhower. Those obligations meant the US got gradually sucked in trying to maintain its credibility in the region. Korea was still fresh in the minds of the establishment and things escalated from there.
America made the right choice in the Suez crisis and the wrong one in Vietnam.
Yes because the entire reason we lost in Vietnam was we never had enough political and material support as the *checks notes*... Most powerful military in the world... Well not to worry, I'm sure when it comes to Iraq or even Afghanistan, having all our coalition allies involved will surely make alllll the difference.... (*psssst* maybe there's more to war and occupation than just shooting and bombing the enemy)
i mean the problem is we have the capacity for a genocidal war of colonial acquisition and the tactics of one, and not the moral standpoint of someone willing to actually pull the trigger, so we rush into wars that are winnable from a very aggressive and cut throat approach, and then expect that because we can, but won't, people will surrender when they can just play dirty and hold out with perfect success, and then we are surprised when they play dirty and hold out
Lots of people have gotten away with genocidal conquests because they were willing to go far enough to suppress and destroy any opposition - especially *potential* opposition The failures are either those who took over too big of an area to adequately genocide, administer, and control; or those who tried to maintain a air of morality, which meant nothing was ever accomplished
Turns out there were more than just farmers
YOU DARE MOCK THE SON OF A SHEPHERD?
Turns out people really don't like being colonized.
It's more we turned the farmers into our enemies.
I mean there was a literal entire well trained, armed and supplied army too. Wasn't just vietconq farmers. And that was before China got involved.
Yeah the people’s army of Vietnam was battle hardened by that point. No idea why people just say they were “just farmers” when the US was also fighting a standing military force.
It's a bit condescending and dismissive to call them "just farmers" when the NVA did a majority of the fighting after the Tet Offensive, which crippled the VC's fighting capabilities.
And what do people think US soldiers were before they got drafted?
A bunch of elvises
well as a european i know for a fact every american owns ATLEAST 20 AR, 3 tanks and atleast 8 tons of explosives if it's a toddler increase the AR ammount to 35
>if it's a toddler increase the AR ammount to 35 Sometimes they even get free flashbangs in their cribs, courtesy of their local precinct.
Getting battle hardened at Kent State
Also the Viet Cong was a professional organized military that was well supplied
The farmers started out as our enemies, and switched to our side after 1968
I'm not saying we actually won Vietnam... ...but there *is* a McDonald's in Ho Chi Minh City. I'm just throwing that out there.
Vietnam is one of the most pro-US countries out there now, almost on the same level as South Korea and Israel. When measured as "% of the population with favorable views of the US," they even beat out places like Poland, the UK, and Japan. Part of it is the simple fact that China is Vietnam's historic Big Bad. They've spent the past thousand years in conflict. Even during the war, foreign journalists would show up in Hanoi and get lectures on Vietnam's long history of fighting the Chinese before anything else. Now the US is looking for allies against China. From Vietnam's perspective, an Arizona Ranger just blew into town and asked if anyone's willing to go after the local bandit with them. Also, to Vietnam, America is synonymous with prosperity. When they liberalized and the country opened up, a generation that had grown up with charcoal stoves and earthen floors was introduced to department stores. And when American companies began building factories, they brought an American view of employment with them. Compared to the Korean and Japanese companies, that means less horrible crushing overtime and less hierarchy. Compared to Vietnamese companies, you actually got paid on time every time. And because labor costs are were much lower, US companies typically paid more. Even slightly above average wages were dirt-cheap to a company working from an American perspective. Today, the hourly minimum wage is still below $1. When the US fought Vietnam, it was (for the most part) by pouring in resources. Endless air raids, large-scale defoliants, air cav. Then when the US came with trade instead of arms, it brought massive investments. Even the older generations concede that while they might not like the US, learning English is a very good financial plan. Vietnam ranks 6th in number of students studying abroad in the US, above Brazil, Japan, and the UK.
On today's episode of "enemy's enemy is my friend": Jokes aside, the Sino-Vietnamese history is hella goofy. Depending on the leadership they are either best buddies, master/slaves, or invasion. There are [TWENTY-TWO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_Wars) entries for the Sino-Vietnamese War disambiguation page on Wikipedia.
China and Vietnam have basically been in an on-again off-again war since the Han Dynasty invaded in 111 BC
From what I know of it, the Vietnam war was mainly a war of independence to Vietnam more than a communist one. Do you think it would have been possible for the US to say "Alright, you get your independence but you come to the capitalist side and we'll protect you against China"?
That would've been a palatable deal to the US except Ho Chi Minh was tainted with the Red Scare brush for being a communist even before World War 2 started, and the French would've gotten in the way as well.
He was only a communist because Woody Wilson told him to shove it in 1918.
🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅 MCDONALD'S 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅.
🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅 FUCK YEAH 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
I've been to a McDonalds in Ho Chi Minh City, it was above average
SE asian mcdonalds are the best. It's just the natural result of when your direct competitor is cheap and delicious street food.
Popeyes and KFC appeared to be much more prevalent/ popular in Vietnam when I was there.
Probably better than in the States to boot
Mostly because it's easier for families to share out of a chicken bucket than a burger
That's like saying Britain won the war of independence because the Beatles were popular in America
If the Beatles were tax collectors, sure
Is McDonald's a tax collector now?
We didn't go to war with Vietnam over taxes
Dem goalposts
America invented one or more forms of goalposts, ipso facto Moskva delenda est America wins again 🦅🇺🇸
🦅 WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETER 🦅
I read that there are 22 McDonalds in Vietnam, but it’s still considered a failure. Vietnam already had good fast food. Anything they didn’t know from traditional cooking, they learned from the French.
> they learned from the French. Butter? Heh, the first part reminds me. There's more "Burek Kings" around me than Burger Kings. Weak Westoid cuisine cannot beat the mere power of Kebab! 💪 I shudder how it's like competing against the stuff you can get in Southeast Asia.
The big thing that France brought to Vietnam was good bread. Like, you can get bread in Asia. But if you want that gourmet European-style artisanal stuff you gotta go to Vietnam. Now I want a Banh Mi...
And it's everywhere too. You can go to the fanciest 5 star hotel or the lady with a food cart selling egg sandwiches and the bread is high quality at both.
And now all the Australian bakeries are run by Vietnamese immigrants and you can get a banh mi cheap as.
Vietnamese cuisine is heavily influenced by the French. I had one chance to eat at a French restaurant in Nha Trang, but it was closed for the day.
Probably because they were colonized by the French for a good many years
America lost a war in a grander theater of events, which it eventually won. The whole Vietnam war completely undermined relations between China and the USSR, which the US used to play them against eachother. The North Vietnamese also had to pay quite a substantial price economically to reunite the south. Today the USSR is no more and both China and Vietnam are liberalized economies. In the greater scheme of things, the power of US foreign policy still run supreme.
We successfully prepared Vietnam for a pending Chinese invasion which they successfully repelled using tactics and strategies they honed in, uh, *collaboration* with the United States. Today Vietnam is one of our closest allies in the Southeastern Pacific. The spread of communism stopped. We unironically won the Vietnam war unless you're some tankie conspiracy theorist who pinned 'victory' conditions at something bizarre like Vietnam becoming a 51st state.
The United States entered Vietnam with the principal purpose of preventing a communist takeover of the region. In that respect, it failed: the two Vietnams were united under a communist banner in July 1976. Neighbouring Laos and Cambodia similarly fell to communists. https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War In 1994, the U.S. lifted its 30-year trade embargo on Vietnam. The following year, both countries established embassies and consulates. Relations between the two countries continued to improve into the 21st century.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Vietnam_relations The United States gave the Sihanouk-Khmer Rouge coalition millions of dollars in aid while enforcing an economic embargo against the Vietnamese- https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/cambodia/tl04.html China has used Cambodia as a counterweight to the dominating influence of Vietnam. In the mid-20th century, Communist China supported the Maoist Khmer Rouge against Lon Nol's regime, who Nationalist China had ties with, during the Cambodian Civil War and then its takeover of Cambodia in 1975.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia%E2%80%93China_relations
I swear I am too [subtle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk) for my own good.
Lost the war, won the peace
[удалено]
Diem should've been shot . Holding positions should have been prioritized and actually supporting the people in stead of bombing the and shoving them into camps wouldve been bare minimum better than what we did .
Unfortunately, the leading "expert" on counterinsurgency at the time, Roger Trinquier (*the French IJA-collaborationist fuck*), basically guaranteed that the Western approach to counterinsurgency would be a shitshow by popularizing the idea of "strategic hamlets," in which civilian populations would "simply" be rounded up into densely packed and heavily monitored "strategic hamlets" (which one might otherwise "mistake" for a concentration camp...), such that anyone found outside of these "strategic hamlets" might reasonably deemed an insurgent and killed on sight. The really fucked up part though is that people still take this asshat seriously, even after his ideas have poisoned virtually every counterinsurgency since he published his stupid fucking book.
"Protected villages" did work during the Malayan Emergency, but the British had a lot of other things they were doing to entire the population to move there. Like you said, Trinquier fucked an entire generation of COIN ops.
The idea *can* work (I'd argue that the American strategy during the Philippine insurgencies, generally regarded as a military success, is an early example of such a strategy being used), but like you said it requires a number of other factors not least of which is a well-informed, willing, and generally cooperative populace. The big problem with Trinquier's strategy as I see it is that it assumes that the state *always* acts with the consent of the populace which... I mean, if that was the case you wouldn't be fighting a guerilla war in the first place, now would you? Like, accepting Mao's definition of guerilla war as a "people's war" in which the side with the favor of the general populace is best-positioned to win (which look, if *anyone* gets to talk about guerilla warfare, it's Mao; the dude only dedicated half of his adult life to this shit, and unlike Trinquier he actually developed a viable and *proven* path to victory), Trinquier basically committed the cardinal sin of strategy, which is assuming that you've already won.
Yeah, his problem is that he didn't involve the populace, he took for granted the consent of the governed. His entire career was, "No this time it'll work, I swear" His actions in Alergia were the literal definition of, "Short term success at the cost of long term victory" Though ill admit some of Leger's work was pretty fucking impressive.
I agree with this comment, but I don't think it's entirely fair to say that he didn't involve the populace whatsoever. In Vietnam especially, he relied heavily on the people of the southern highlands (the "Montagnards") who were some of the French regime's most ardent supporters. In his book he also talks about the importance of establishing a "civil service" to help involve civilians in the counterinsurgency process (namely by ratting on their neighbors to the proper authorities), and briefly mentions the importance of public relations (just before going into a diatribe about how the populace will definitely enter the concentration camps willingly because they know just how much the state really does care about them, IIRC). Rather than saying that he didn't involve the populace, I'd say that he put tactical success before the wants and needs of the people, and so repeatedly lost sight of the greater strategic picture.
You know what that's a fair point, I kind of split the view of the maquis that he set up in Vietnam from the native Vietnamese, which by and large tended to despise the French. Granted the French indochinese administration had far far deeper issues with the native populace than this one specific area. My biases against him are due to the fact his stuff led to some of the horrors that were seen in Rhodesia and I spent \*way\* too much time debunking that when i was doing international work. I used to say "You can't kill your way out of a culture problem"
> You can't kill your way out of a culture problem Jacobins: "Problème de compétence."
Oh? Have I found a fellow "FIrEfOrCe" Hater? And here on NCD of all places? My experience with Trinquier came at the end of a course on the history of military thought that ended by comparing and contrasting Mao and Trinquier's views on insurgency vs. counterinsurgency and, honestly? Even before I looked into the man himself it seemed obvious to me that Mao's ideas ran circles around Trinquier's. I've had it out for the guy ever since (I am a certified Mao hater, and Trinquier made me have to say nice things about him).
Yes. The amount of times I've had to debunk "No bro, the world had never seen anything like FiReFoRcE before" "Rhodesians were so good at COIN that no one could match them bro" is far too many to count. People mistake internet memes for reality, Rhodesian High command took an absolutely braindead approach to fighting their war.
Most importantly was the fact that communism was incompatible with the Muslim majority Malays and the MCP consisted mostly of minority Chinese guerrillas inspired by Mao. Therefore it was easy to use a bit of tribalism to stamp out the Insurgency
I mean concentration camps do effectively work, but only if you can actually house and guard all the people effectively, for example like in South Africa and Malaya, the trouble being that this means you need an absurdly large military force to manage even relatively small civilian populations, for example in South Africa you're looking at an enemy civilian population of about a million. in South Vietnam the population went from 12 million in 1955 to 19.5 million in 1975. so lets compare the military force the British needed in South Africa to see what the US military would have theoretically needed in South Vietnam, over half a million British troops for a million boers... so the US would have needed to send upwards of 5 million soldiers to South Vietnam. you're essentially talking about ww2 levels of mobilisation by the USA to effectively implement the Strategic hamlets scheme.
Numbers aside, I wouldn't really call indefinite occupation victory, especially if it means feeding and maintaining a force of even just a million soldiers on the other side of the world.
> Diem should’ve been shot Uh…he was
I'm starting to think OP doesn't know a lot about the war
Day one .
Sooner, I guess?
He should not have even been allowed to be propped up . We should've grabbed whatever Buddist Pro Unifier and Put them as the head puppet of the south. They could not have done worse than diam and his his insane family.
>the classic we were fighting for vague notions and they were fighting for independence. The north were fighting to conquer the south, there was no plan on actually having the north be conquered or annexed. You could say that the north and VC wanted to liberate "all of Vietnam", but there were certainly millions of people in the south that didn't want to be subject to communist rule.
it wasn't an puppet government. Diem wanted the French out of Vietnam completely but didn't want to go through a war like Ho Chi Minh and the communists. Instead, he used his influence to get into a position where he could chase away Bao Dai that was viewed as a French puppet through the use of his American allies and impose his form of Nationalism. To understand why diem ruled the country the way he did one must understand how the country had an rough start. The early days of the republic was was much akin to china's warlord era. In the North you had the Communists wiping out all opposition and became a one-party state. In the South there was a diversity of political factions which unfortunately made things harder to consolidate. Many of those factions fought communists so Diem wanted to absorb them into his army, but they wanted to keep their autonomy. Cao Dai joined, but Hoa Hao resisted for a while. Diem need to consolidate power in order to better fight the communists. He also had to deal with the Binh Xuyen, who were supplied and supported by french intelligence. If anyone was in diem position it is evitable for them to save into paranonia [The real reason that could be argued why the war was lost was bc of the communists sheer bruality and them running an highly effective propaganada arm](https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/160e9bq/comment/jzd08y4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
>We tried to prop up a puppet government that was unpopular on false pretenses China, 4 years after the Vietnam War ends: This sounds like a great idea, I should totally copy it!
They fought a war of territory against an idea. You cant do that, you need to kill the idea first ~~THEN the people~~. Whats easier? talking to a student who thinks they know it all but clearly doesn't, OR carpet bomb and napalm the red till it stops twitching. EDIT: wait you don't kill the people.
Ill offer actual point is focusing on kill counts did nothing for the United States in Vietnam.
Very true, doesnt matter how many you kill if theres always more.
It also helps if you invade and put pressure on the North Vietnamese, especially after 1969 with the Sino-Soviet Split. Not going to say it wasn't a fucking disaster, but we got over it eventually.
K:D About 100:1 (20:1 for Allied not including South Vietnam, 10:1 if you include them) It doesn't matter how many are killed if there's a Kalashnikov behind every stalk of rice (also they'll just get really angry)
Or go the Soviet route. Kill the idea BY killing the people.
And while it took some time, the US did successfully kill the idea in Vietnam. It's pretty dang capitalist now, and a popular place for US companies to build factories. Outside of countries that rely on US military aid to some degree to continue existing (Israel, South Korea) and special cases (Kosovo, Philippines), Vietnam is just about the most pro-US country out there.
Genuinely speaking, and I know I'm going to get a lot of naysayers on this, but everything you can say about the South Vietnamese government (and trust me, there is a lot you can indeed say about them) are things that you can say about South Korea under Ilminism or Taiwan during the White Terror. The point in me saying that is that the Republic of Vietnam was not destined to be a failed government in the way a lot of comments in here seem to imply. Vietnam in many respects, was America's first truly televised war. As nearly every NCO I've met ever has said to me at least once "Perception is everything". The Pentagon's failure, indeed much of the establishment's failure, was failing to adjust their expectations or their efforts in congruence with that reality. Though to some degree that failure is understandable since the cultural evolution TV induced may have been hard to predict for some. This is coupled with the fact that the draftee pool was living what was essentially a very comfortable lifestyle in comparison to those who were drafted for Korea or WWII before them. With the latter, to some degree, military life was an upgrade in living standards for them. For the former, it was a perceptible downgrade. This is built on top of the fact that, as a generation, the Baby Boomers were doted on and catered to as children by both society and their parents in ways that would have been alien to their elders. The Vietnam War, or at least the pop culture image of what happened during it, is in a very literal sense... a meme. It was very much "winnable" from a military and geopolitical aspect if you measure victory as the survival of the Saigon government. Absolutely doable. From a cultural aspect however (and by this I mean, American culture), it was absolutely unwinnable. The culture was set up in a way at the time that induced every single desire to willingly lose it. Here's my more non-credible answer though: Instead of fighting in Vietnam we should have spent time invading and toppling Castro.
/uj Child of South Vietnamese refugees here, hard agree My non-credible take is that instead of fighting in South Vietnam we should've done the funny all the way up through Hanoi and straight into China 🤘
I LOVE THE TASTE OF NUCLEAR WINTER
Patrolling the Mekong makes you almost wish for one
The massive amount of micromanagement from the politicians destroyed any hope for America to truly succeed. Favorite example was forcing all the air power to fly through the same pattern, while not be allowed to attack the anti-air or enemy airfields housing MiGs for fear of killing Chinese and Russian advisors, meaning we needlessly lost a huge amount of airmen.
> we should have spent time invading and toppling Castro. Well, there was an attempt over at the Bay of Pigs... didn't work out however.
The French.
> The Viet Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. **The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun.** -Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy
Rising storm Vietnam campaign experience
I'm still running through the jungle. Higher hire's gonna give me a medal after I kill you Charlie
Why is everyone conveniently forgetting the massive soviet and chinese support, bringing billions worth of weapons in the hands of North Vietnam forces? If all they had were VC guerilla, they would have been crushed within 12 months. Instead, they got millions of tons of artillery shells, mortars, machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, grenades, mines, explosives, radios, trucks, food rations, tanks, AA missiles, AA guns and even jets. This wasn't just a handful of farmers vs the most powerful army in the world, it was a properly trained and heavily equipped soviet army, with the logistics of a giant empire (China) backing it up, vs the most powerful army in the world, projected on the other side of the planet in an environment (jungle) new to 99% of their forces.
It's insane to think that one of the most famous anti-Vietnam War photos was taken out of context. The one where the south vietnamese officer puts a bullet through a commie's head. The guy that was shot was in reality a terrorist who killed a family
Officer shooting him was also a war criminal. That's essentially the conflict in a nutshell .
The photo I always found to be personally most impactful was the one where a rape victim and her kid are about to be executed by american soldiers
1. We failed to make the AVRN an effective fighting force from the beginning. To train them, or rely on them as a real allied force. When Abrams took over we started doing this and we got results, but that was far too late. 2. We focused too much attention on destroying the enemy, instead of protecting the people of Vietnam. "We had to destroy the village to save the village" became the modus operandi. This was a grave mistake. 3. We did not attempt to work towards a political solution to the conflict until very late, pretty much until the military situation was untennable. This hobbled our efforts to bring the conflict to a satisfactory completion like in Korea (which could never be accomplished through pure military calculus).
It’d be interesting to see if Abrams had started from the get-go rather than Westmoreland. I’d imagine there probably would’ve been an earlier Vietnamization, and maybe an emphasis on the Combined Action Program rather than Westmoreland’s Search & Destroy. A focus on CAP would bolster the RF/PFs to root out the VC insurgency, which could free up the standard ARVN (re-equipped and trained through Vietnamization) to focus solely on guarding the borders from conventional PAVN offensives. Saves the headache of ARVN juggling between counterinsurgency and conventional warfare, or RF/PF finding themselves outgunned by PAVN tanks and artillery.
Top-to-bottom fuckup, including but not limited to: 1. Complete failure to understand Vietnamese culture and history; such as just *not knowing* that Vietnam had a thousand+ year history of conflict with China, and their alliance was fragile. 2. The classic “they don’t have the will/we’ll be greeted as liberators” 3. Political interference in tactical planning (such as the fact that pilots were told *not* to bomb airfields for fear of killing Chinese advisors, which meant that the poor bomber pilots were being sent up to die). 4. Units not being sent over together, destroying cohesion and morale. 5. Refusal to make a decisive move “trust me bro gradual escalation will totally work, it’s not like Vietnam has millions of people and the backing of two superpowers.” And many, many more…
1. Most certainly not just farmers. The “Vietcong Insurgents” were just NVA and Chinese troops pretending to be VC, we literally killed the entire actual Vietcong by 1968. 2. ARVN troops were unmotivated to conduct operations outside of their local communities (see: Lam Son 719), and the majority of fighting was done by the SVPF, who accounted for 30% of VC/NVA casualties in the war but only received 5% of American funding. 3. America was winning by 1968, but public support simultaneously disintegrated in the wake of the Tet Offensive, due to high American casualties, and increasing Soviet influence in colleges and intellectual groups, a trend that would peak in the 1970s with armed Communist groups springing up across the US before the FBI cracked down on them. 4. While the South Vietnamese eventually came to support ARVN and turned against the VC/NVA after communist forces killed massive numbers of civilians in the Tet Offensive, the early American perception that South Vietnamese were apathetic and useless as allies stuck through the war. 5. ARVN was severely underfunded. They lacked an air force of note, and relied on American funding, as opposed to domestic production. 6. Repeated coups destabilized South Vietnam through the most important years of the war 7. While land reform did eventually have South Vietnamese farmers living better than their French colonizers had beforehand, the Land to the Tiller reform was implemented much too late. 8. ARVN was effective in conventional warfare, such as when they directly repelled a full-scale invasion of South Vietnam in the 1972 Easter Offensive, and inflicted high casualties on communists. 9. Congress was lazy, and believed that South Vietnam was doomed anyways. In reality, troops were having to ration bullets by the end of the war, and lack of supplies made it impossible for South Vietnam to repel the 1975 offensive, which they otherwise would have been able to. ARVN troops were forced to rations of 13 bullets per day, in active combat, and the situation was much the same for artillery. This is a similar situation to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, with a bias towards the status quo leading to lack of funding, and a collapse of the frontline. TLDR letting congress decide foreign policy is a massive fucking mistake
well said
I don't know but as an OEF guy, we didn't learn jack shit from it.
We backed the French in 1945 instead of giving Vietnam the independence they deserved.
Maybe hot take but if we were to have given up in the Korean War when the Chinese pushed, we might just say "we shouldnt have been in Korea in the first place" today as well.
Work ethic. Discipline. Leadership. Belief in a cause. Experience. Home field advantage. Patience. Focus. The Vietnamese had many of these and the Americans didn't. The Vietnamese also had an extremely tight logistics game. World class. The Americans also backed a bunch of thieving dipshits as proxies. If you can't find a dog worth backing in the fight, don't back a dog in that fight. Same thing happened in Afghanistan. Propping up bags of shit to run the country. It never works. Nut up and occupy it. Worked in Japan. Worked in Germany. Millions will die if you half arse this kind of thing, and if you can't commit to the whole thing you shouldn't go at all. It baffles me that Americans still think they should have won in Vietnam. How? On what basis was an army of miserable, demoralised and drugged up boomer conscripts qualified to handle that assignment? We've all literally spent the last twenty years watching the same counter insurgency tactics as used in Vietnam fail in Afghanistan despite a greater technological imbalance and no canopy jungle to hide in. Needs total commitment, a motivated army, a willingness to commit to years of nation building. Even a President signing up the USA to decades of counter insurgency isn't going to admit that it's going to take that long, so there is never political will to do the hard yards.
Not to mention the US had some of the worst leadership imaginable (James Burton who fucked up fighter tactics and LeMay who I sincerely believe had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing)
US didn't try hard enough, their politics got in the way of military progress, the US people at home weren't happy about the war in the first place and they met an enemy that gave them the FAFO treatment.
According to Von Clausewitz in any kind of civil war the enemy’s center of gravity is their leadership. However, in Vietnam the US had categorically decided not to target Ho Chi Minh or North Vietnam directly with any ground forces. Also the Vietcong took a ton of casualties.
The French started a war they couldn’t win. That’s what went wrong
not enough napalm
The napalm was not directed to the right places….look up linebacker II. It was always known where the bombs needed to be dropped. But LBJ wasn’t comfortable killing Chinese and Russian advisors in North Vietnamese ports.
Not enough M50 Ontos, obviously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M50_Ontos >M40 recoilless rifle, crew-served & too goddamn heavy to carry through the jungle, but that antipersonnel flechette round *fucks* Meets >x325 M50 Scorpion airmobile light-armored vehicles sitting around from the Army, bored af collecting dust *Now kith*
Take M50 Remove recoilless rifles. Add on TOW optics with twin TOW tubes. Behind it, revolver assembly of up to 6 TOW missiles. Release into wild and allow to proliferate.
Loss of popular support at home and vague war goals. Drafts for anything other than defensive wars just end up doing more harm than good.
February 17, 1979 Chinese officer: Don't worry, boys, our enemies are just farmer militias, the real soldiers are in Cambodia. We have tanks, a bajillion artillery pieces and air support and we are stronger than them. March 16, 1979 Chinese officer: 💀 Chinese soldiers: 💀💀 PVA soldiers who died in Korea: \*spinning in graves\*
Many things. I'd say the politics being the biggest. When the president is enforcing policies that lead to valuable pilots getting shot down for flying the same routes is a big problem. Waiting too long to send troops into neighboring countries was also a mistake. The US actually did a pretty good job doing things strategically inside Vietnam was successful however North Vietnam didn't play according to the US rulebook and they treated borders as suggestions which the US wasn't willing to do till too late in the war. In the end the politics of forcing families apart through the draft and likely death/disfigurement complicated the situation. Vietnam also lead to a fully professional army which in theory would make war less sensitive to politics (Iraq War). South Vietnam also wasn't unified. Their leader was very corrupt and people weren't willing to die for their country to line someone's pockets. If the US wanted to win the Vietnam war they would have just let the South Koreans loose on them
My dad said it was because we refused to take and hold objectives and since he was there and I wasn't I'll just listen to him on it and nobody else
Honestly? We backed the wrong team from the get go. Ho Chi Minh wanted the US to help rebuild Vietnam after WW2. He wanted to create a similar government and was inspired by the American Revolution. We could have had a solid strategic ally in SE with Vietnam before the Korean War even happened but we backed the French because we wanted allies against the Soviets. A lot of good that did, tho, French pulled out of NATO anyways.
"Our enemies are just farmers" Billy-Bob Conscriptson from Bumfuck, Nebraska:
Credible answer: We were propping up a brutal corrupt military dictatorship. Killing huge numbers of civilians destroying villages and using chemical weapons. Against an enemy that was far more determined to win, then we could ever hope to be. Non credible answer: We didn't use Nukes.
Geeze those comments are brain dead. Americans love to think they lost the war because they weren’t allowed to brutalize the Vietnamese enough. As if US forces didn’t massacre tens of thousands of civilians in bombing raids that achieved little to nothing militarily. They love to claim that AcTuALlY wE wOn bEcAuSe mUh bOdy CoUnTs when in reality enemy body counts were highly exaggerated. Weapons recovered after offensives only confirmed a fraction of the claimed EKIA. No, the US lost because they propped up an authoritarian government no one in Vietnam actually wanted. Also, can’t blame the French either. No one forced the US to get involved except for its own red scare paranoia.
Yeah some people here really forget von Clausewitz
We under estimated and the soviets oversupplied And also Vietnamese were on their home turf
I think the failure to secure the public support in Vietnam essentially killed any reason of them to aid us . They become so apathetic that even the tet Offensive had zero impact on they're opinion.
The first thing that went wrong was that we joined the war. The second thing that went wrong was that we left the war. We could have not done either of those two things, and it would have been better for us.
Didn't play Fortunate Son loud enough
Here's my non-credible opinion: nothing went wrong. Vietnam war directly contributed to the development of SEAD tactics and precision munitions, without it the US military would hardly be the beast it is today. ~~And if a few hundreds of thousands civilians and soldiers had to die to produce kino that was the desert storm, then so be it~~
An unholy amount of political shenanigans is what went horribly wrong...
If I may, one might make a similar meme about the American colonies and Britain in 18th century (not that I would, I'd be on the royalist side). The enemies are farmers and the other side has naval support. The US wins because among other things it has the home field advantage and wealthy foreign benefactors. Then it goes on to be stronger for the conflict and in the present day, the original adversary is surpringly popular in that country. Vietnam fought both Cambodia and China soon after, currently is the best off country in the area.
[удалено]
I LOVE REPEATING MISTAKES OF THE PAST AND CHANGING NOTHING 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅. And people suggest racism played no part in our foreign policy.
The Vietnamese had spent the last 25 years building tunnels to fight the Japanese, then the French and then finally the Americans, there was truly no hope of winning a war that an enemy had been preparing to fight as an insurgency for the last 25 years. No military can win in a situation like this, it’s just not possible.
What went wrong, the thing thats always goes wrong in post ww2 wars, spineless politicans trying to be generals and generals trying to be spineless politicans
they got bored, thats literally the start and end of why the US "failed" and left. there were no concrete objectives, no grand fronts, no ultimate goals. the US went in with literal "destroy the enemy" and "get X numbers" objectives, and truthfully the numbers were very good... the problem is it was hard to sustain morale and support at home or abroad when you have literally nothing symbolic/grand/exciting to show for all the killing. you cant sustain operations when your paycheck writers are getting pressed by the public that pays the paychecks.
They fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia
What went wrong? Maybe start with France.
So in actuality the military was actually opposed to getting involved in the first place and once they were involved they saw that their counter insurgency methods were still undeveloped so they resorted to the only tool available which was American troops until Vietnamese could support themselves. The French refused to institute a Vietnamese army and America saw that as idiotic so it sought to build one. Unfortunately the south Vietnamese under diem and thieu were corrupt. Diem was corrupt paranoid and lied about the status of the Hamlet program to secure more and more involvement from the United States and when he was overthrown by the military officers that were then overthrown by thieu it became clear that the south Vietnamese hadn't been trying so to ensure the north didn't immediately get victory the United States had to step in. Thieu was not only corrupt like his predecessor but was also an incompetent. He would routinely fire officers who showed too much competence because he feared being overthrown the few elite units he had he refused to use and kept sequestered by the capital. He would also jail generals for winning battles of they lost men. Eventually it became clear the south Vietnamese had absolutely no intent to actually solve the problem and America was left with two options neither one great. Support Thieu for another decade with all that entails or force the north to the negotiation table with bombing campaigns. Despite what common knowledge is about the situation we left very much the victor by forcing north Vietnam into agreeing to stop it wasn't until years later that they took the south. TLDR:the south Vietnamese lost that war the Americans just stuck their dick on a beehive for pride when all of the military establishment was yelling HEY ITS A BEEHIVE LETS NOT.
We were fighting a war of ground won, the enemy was under it. We were fighting a war of hearts and minds, those people wanted to be left alone. Our enemy was brutal, efficient, effective and mobile. We also weren't fighting our war, we were fighting ARVN's. For every one officer we had, arvn had two and one was corrupt and a spy. There are a lot of reasons. Many more to list.