Lazarus_Long, re: "Let me restate that and put it the way it normally is: The American Army never lost a major battle in Vietnam. Now you prove that wrong."
Well, you've finally stated a proposition that merits discussion, but to "prove you wrong" I'd have to know what you considered a major battle and what you considered a loss. I don't really care, however, because in Vietnam, in the historical sense of that word, there were no "major battles."
If the NVA and the VC had actually been foolish enough to mass for a decisive "battle," the war would have been over in weeks or days. We OWNED the skies. Think about the firepower we had in the air and you'll understand what that meant.
So, even though companies were wiped out, battalions were momentarily defeated and there was a constant string of dead Americans numbering in the hundreds every week, we never "lost" a "major battle" where we'd committed our troops. We did, however, lose the "desire" to maintain a presence in certain sections of jungle. "No fly zones" were established in Vietnam and on two occasions my Company went into areas got so hot that after they pulled us out they never again sent troops there. But YOU wouldn't consider that a lost battle.
So those of you who persist in thinking we "could have won" have something to hang your hats on.
Given that we "won" all those battles, you'll first ask how could we "lose" the war. then you'll think that we could have "won" if we'd just kept "defeating them."
That's shallow thinking because you're not asking the right question.
You lose the war because winning in Vietnam wasn't about winning military battles, any more than Iraq is about winning military battles.
The real battle was for what is euphemistically called the "hearts and minds" of the native population and the important tactics that will achieve victory in that battle are primarily not military, but political tactics.
Why is that? First, no nation can long sustain a major, extended military campaign half world away. It's a huge suction pulling out resources, lives and resolve and eventually the cost/benefits will mandate withdrawal. In order to shorten the conflict to manageable cost/benefit parameters it's necessary to enlist the aid of the locals and empower them to prevail.
What does that mean? First, it means that you have to define a "goal" that the locals will want badly enough to fight for. Second, the locals who buy into your mission have to be more committed and more powerful than the locals on the other side. Third, in the conduct of the "war" you have to be sure that everything you do, from defining the mission, to conducting the mission and to improving the everyday lot of the locals, is designed to foster more aid, more support and less resistance.
And if you do everything right it's still going to be an uphill battle because, hey, you're the funny smelling, funny speaking, belligerent, Goliath foreigner and the local resistance boys are the David underdogs. The longer a fledgling insurgency survives the worse it will get. In practice you'll only have a window of a handful of years, at best, to "win" or get the hell out.
So yes, you could reasonably argue that we never "lost" a major military battle in Vietnam, but to piggyback that into the conclusion that we'd have therefor "won" if we'd have stayed is nonsensical. We lost the only battle that counted, the hearts and minds battle to stand in the way of the river of history that eventually brought them to a unified, communist governed, Vietnam.
And that's why when Rumsfeld and the generals started saying that we had "inadequate intelligence" to identify the insurgents, I became convinced that the Iraqis weren't going to buy what we were selling and that we'd eventually have to "declare victory," and leave. We should have done that long ago, just as we should have left Vietnam long before we did. A lot of good soldiers would still be alive and both countries would have had a smoother path to whatever resolution they were destined to achieve. Ed |
