All Vietnam did was prove that you cannot drag a press-ganged ill-trained army of refuse into a difficult war, and arm-chair general it by a business executive who misses the whole point about military action, brutalize the civilian population, lose the hearts and minds, and expect to win. The US "lost" in Vietnam because they were poorly generaled, not supported as a real military action by non military civilian leaders, and their men were woefully untrained for "jungle" or any sort of cover warfare. (Vietnam is not a jungle. It is less a rainforest than Louisiana, Carolina or even Ontario. It is primarily open forest grassland.) Their aircraft were inadequate, their main personnel field weapon junk (the AR-15), and their tactics/strategy lame-brained. They were overcome or stopped by rag tag guerilla fighters and WWI tunneling tactics.
All the US had going for them, and ditto the Korean war, was superior logistics based on carrier/air supply. If MacArthur had any real brains, he would have foreseen the Chinese attack and the bad winter conditions and prepared his forces for it. If you ask he wanted the Chinese to win an attack so he could justify the use of atomics. And if that is true, he was even more of a magnificent lame-brain, underscored by the loss of his air-force on the ground to the Japanese in the Phillipines.
All the US proved in Vietnam was that with overwhelming supply and equipment advantages, you can outspend a better fighting force that has less resources until you get tired of not beating them at all decisively. Generals have repeatedly pointed out and proven in war games that the US has no anti-guerilla tactics or trained anti-guerilla forces. The Russians had these forces in the 19th century, The Romans developed similar tactics during the campaigns in Gaul and Britain. The OSS wrote books on the subject in Malaysia. Arthur Hugh Currie proved the corollary in WW1. The Normans dealt with the idea in Britain after 1066.
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