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To: Dayuhan who wrote (12225)	8/31/1998 1:03:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

>I still maintain that fighting a full scale war in pursuit of a non-critical objective is madness, especially when the other side knows that you have no overriding national interest at stake. < The Sovs, may they rest in peace, learned that in Afghanistan. I agree that we would have had a miserable time trying to garrison Viet Nam. We would merely have hastened the Sov/Chicom development of a Stinger missile analog. And we're not very good at the sort of intensive footsoldiering that goes with opposing a dispersed guerilla army.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (12225)	9/1/1998 12:50:00 AM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Guerilla tactics forced the withdrawal of US support, without which the fall of South Vietnam was inevitable. You need to turn in your crystal ball for repair, as it apparent;y failed to notice the 1972 Easter Offensive. As I'm sure you remember, the ARVN defeated the NVA without American combat troops. The difference in this battle and their defeat in 1975 was that they no longer had ammunition and gasoline in 1975, thanks to the 1974 US Congress abandoning the South Vietnamese to save themselves on their own if they could. Some think of it as betraying people who depended upon us; you think of it as Perhaps they were frustrated at the amount of ammunition and gasoline finding its way onto the black market. The Soviets and Chinese didn't emulate the Democrat Congress, and did keep the NVA supplied with heavy armor and plenty of gasoline. Unsurprisingly, the NVA conquered South Vietnam with conventional war tactics and heavy armored columns. They used so much armor that they had traffic jams as they drove south. They were sitting ducks for the airpower that you believe wouldn't have worked: Airpower is of questionable utility against dispersed assets, as repeatedly demonstrated in Vietnam, and later Afghanistan. Armor requires roads and bridges, meaning a massive and vulnerable engineering presence. Apparently they didn't study at the same war college that you did, as armor is exactly what they did use. In order to mass and support such equipment they needed infrastructure that the boondocks didn't have, which is why attacking their port and one major city would have eliminated their capacity to invade the south. Forcing them to defend their home ground would have concentrated their forces in the north and forced them to fight on ground of our choosing. Moreover there was no need to occupy the north, merely the need to destroy their major assets and deprive them of the ability to project power into the south. This was the strategy in Kuwait, and you may have noticed that Iraq no longer occupies Kuwait despite the continued rule of Saddam Hussein. The guerilla is a very real threat. The guerilla is a threat when you decide to make your troops fight a static, defensive war. The success of guerilla tactics depended upon our continued use of bad strategy. Taking the war to the enemy, forcing them to use their assets to defend themselves, choosing the ground upon which to fight, depriving them of sanctuary, cutting their supply lines, destroying their infrastructure; all of this we used in WWII, and our politicos seemed to have learned none of it as they wouldn't allow this to be done in Vietnam.