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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (157394)	1/3/2003 9:08:14 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1583374

I don't get anywhere in the history of the Vietnamese War that there was a real lack of commitment until the very end. Then I think you either haven't looked at it thoroughly or looked at it with an open mind and a general understanding of military issues. A real commitment to win doesn't mean you let someone else control the pace of the war or that you fight a war against a country while placing an invasion or sustained attacks against that country off limits. the Vietnamese were playing on their home turf but Americans have a huge hero complex. We expect to win. The commitment may have waned near the end but I don't think this issue was the crux of the problem. I agree with the "we expected to win" comment. We thought that we would be able to win without changeing our way of operating. We thought we would win under tight political rules against a determined enemy who didn't have the same rules. We thought we were so superior that we didn't have to fight a real war just set up a defense and bomb the enemy every now and then, or hunt down guerilla forces without cutting off there supply or attacking their base, and we would win anyway. And such tactics would have worked against a weak willed and easily awed or cowed enemy but the Vietnames communist were not so easily cowed. We were commited to the idea of winning but we were not commited to actually doing what it would take to win. But that's runs to the heart of the issue.....jungle fighting didn't lend itself to major battles but rather small skirmishes There where quitea few major battles or campaigns of smaller battles. And when South Vietnam fell it was to a conventional invasion. And why was that? Because after Tet a lot of people at home viewed the war as a losing effort, partially because of dishonesty or stupidity from the leaders of the war effort who where trying to tell everyone that the war would not be hard and that the communist can not mount major offensives. Its foolish to argue this point because neither of us know for sure how they arrived at the head count on that link. Its very simple they just counted the total number of people who served there at any time. I feel comfortable with the notion that the amount of resources was not the reason for our defeat. I do too. More resources certainly could have helped but what was really needed was a faster escalation to the level we reached and then agressivly using those resources with few limits other then the normal humanitarian ones of not targeting civilians and such. That seems to be very strange reasoning. Its not unlike Bush Sr. pulling his punch in Kuwait. Maybe its an American aberration.......we hesitate to inflict the coup de gras. There is some simularity but the difference is we stopped any Iraqi attacks on Kuwait. We never did stop any North Vietnamese attacks on the south and in the end we failed to protect South Vietnam from the north. In Korea too we didn't deal the coup de gras but that coup de gra would have been a lot harder and more costly and it may have made sense not to go for it. Tim