What caused Vietnam to be such an embarrassment?

Looking at it objectively, the US lost in Vietnam.They only fought to bail out the french who themselves were completely incompetent as well. The mission was to protect the french colonies in "Indochina" and to stop the spread of communism. The french jumped ship, and communism spread not only into Vietnam, but into Laos and Cambodia too. Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?

DELET THIS

Even the best teams sometimes lose to a complete shit team in sports.

The US lost Vietnam because it went in with poorly defined objectives, did not have a coherent exit plan, and overall did not understand a god damn thing about the people of Vietnam, why they were fighting, and how they saw them.

Alot of that can be said about Iraq and Afghanistan as well.

>Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?
Aircraft carriers, nukes/ICBMs and a powerful economy. Are you implying the US is NOT a superpower?

Guerilla warfare is simply that effective. Armies in a defensive position have an extreme advantage in this area, it's all that it comes down to.

I remember listening to an interview from an officer during the vietnam war who wrote a book, I forgot his name. He said that about half of American casualties were due to traps. That's extremely effective and demoralizing.

Casualties are not fatalities. You may get a bamboo shoot stuck through your foot and incapacitated but you probably aren't going to die from it.

What's the effective difference in determining a victor?

>Remind me again how the US is some kind of superpower?
We can nuke you?

Morale, probably.

>It's a "The NVA were just rice farmers with AK-47's" episode

if you wanna play that game, why is China considered a superpower if they got BTFO by the zipperheads right after the US got out?

Home field advantage.

The gooks had a thorough understanding of the land and were masters at guerrilla warfare. They knew that the best way to beat the US was to bleed it dry slowly.

The US made it harder on itself by going full evil empire, slaughtering whole villages, incinerating landscapes, and dropping untold amounts of ordinance on poor mud farmers. This caused them to public support for the war, which added to the attrition.

Also, the yanks had poorly defined strategic goals and could simply be ground to a halt through hit and run tactics.

A lot of other countries have nukes, friendo.

>Guerilla warfare is simply that effective
except that is a very simplified view of the Vietnam War. The vast majority of the effective combat strength of the communist forces was the NVA (which had near-parity in terms of equipment quality), who, while unable to defeat the Americans, were able to not lose because the US could not invade North Vietnam for political reasons. With their entire half of the country practically a safe haven, the US was unable to actually win, especially given how incompetent the Arvins were

Being afraid every single step that you took was the whole point.

Can someone inform me why Korea was a good war that had a good reason for us entering while Vietnam was a shit war that we shouldn't have gone into?

Actually only eight other countries have nukes, and really only North Korea is a laughable nation, while like India and Pakistan are the only other ones that aren't super powers

Rolling Thunder wasn't fully utilized

Liberals back home held too much influence

They never lost a single battle

The problem was they just didn't know what the victory conditions of the war. It's like the war on terror where they dive head first into a war they can't really see the ending to.

They also BTFO'd France before the US got in.

Neither was the Korean war, we just sort of excepted the Norks to surrender the moment they saw the red white and blue. We also couldn't put all of our forces in Korea because of the nuclear threat. China and the Soviets were supporting the North, and if we shit on them to hard they might have had to intervene. The Korean war was a stalemate, returning the borders back to before the war; with communism in the south being avert, but the north still being communist. Jokes on the north though, because North Korea is North Korea

But looking back, imagine if North Korea was allowed to control all of Korea. That's a huge amount of people living in the most Orwellian type of government possible, and the United States and the UN prevented that.

We went to Vietnam and we failed, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, but now today Vietnam is not that bad of a nation, I mean it's doing the best it can, but it's certainly not a North Korea.

Is it because the South Vietnamese didn't like South Vietnam but the South Koreans liked South Korea? I just can't put my finger on it.

mostly because ho chi minh was a based nationalist leader like Tito rather than a Soviet puppet like Kim il sung

guy just didn't want his country oppressed and the US confused it with "dirty commie trying to take away out freedoms!"

That makes sense, thanks friend

I am not entirely sure what you are asking, but it is pretty easy to have our allies become traitors when you continually bomb their towns because you cant tell who is an enemy and who isnt. There was a really clear distinction between a north Korean and a south Korean, but in Vietnam they all just blended together because there were communist forces on all sides rather than just one border line. After world war 2, the entire Korean peninsula was a completely new nation, but the North was heavily Chinese PLA influenced while the south had US/British/Australian influences. Everyone in Vietnam had the French and Americans, but to differing degrees. sorry for rambling

*hated the French

Vietnam still lost. Their last major Tet offensive was a complete military failure.

>Everyone in Vietnam had the French and Americans, but to differing degrees.
I wouldn't say that, a rather large portion of South Vietnamese did anything they could to get the fuck out. The US and Canada accepted tons of them.

>Vietnam still lost
Last time I checked the US left Vietnam from a humiliating 20 year conflict that left it politically divided and internationally hated.

There were plenty of traps that led to death numnuts

Same reason why the American revolution was an embarrassment to the Brits

poor management, diplomacy, and internal pressures at home.
also the realization that the loss didn't really hurt anything but their pride (which was easily gain back by being the most powerful fucks in the world).

If the US were to go to war with any nation in the world, the odds would be in its favor.

USA never invaded North Vietnam during the conflict, only bombed it. Had it been invaded, the war would be over quite sooner. But the fear from USSR and China's retaliation was too great.

There are MacDonalds in Vietnam, and a lot of clothes and shoes are produced there. In the end, the United States won.

war is a means to a political ends nothing else matters

>kill millions of jungle gooks
>They kill 50,000
>Hur `Merica so incompetent

Okay still does not change the fact we fucked their shit up. Have you seen the overall fatalities? Sure we lost pretty much every goal set but we still pushed their shit in

The U.S. won (if you could call it that) tactical battles when pitted against NVA like in Ia Drang Valley, the fact that only Hue fell to commie hands after Text, which was supposed to be a nationwide uprising, and Hue didn't stay occupied too long, but we dropped the ball majorly on every other aspect so what good did winning battles do?

Did any of that matter at all? Are they a threat now? Or any time after that?

>fast food chains in Vietnam
This, culture and shitty food still exported so
10/10 would police action again

that's what I'm saying, the battles were pointless and not worth casualties with the way things have ended up

We underestimated our enemy. It sounds too simple to be true but it is, and that pic is the exact mindset that typified the US' loss in Vietnam.
US: "We have more soldiers and weapons, shouldn't we naturally win?"
NVA: "Lol, welcome to the jungle bitches."

Insurgencies are nasty as fuck
You need to kill an entire villaige to make sure an insurgency cant rise up in that area. Because the army is potentially every civilian.

The biggest problem with modern warfare is that an army can spring up literally overnight potentially anywhere.

Vietnam was military perssonel wanting ww2 glory and getting only spooks.

The way to win against one is a territory and ideological game. You make your own insurgency. If we would have funded militant democratic groups and armed them the communists would have lost. But back then that was almost unheard of, i think afghanistan, the successful us backed insurgency in al qaeda, was later. So we did learn.

You cant kill an army that is only their in name. But you can sure as hell turn them against the very people they are figting for.

How is the US incompetent for losing Vietnam?

It has less to do with the war itself and more with the PR. The US losing a war isn't catastrophic itself, but the fact that we got significantly more than we bargained for and how the government was so panicked by this obvious misstep that they royally fucked their relationship with the press and the citizenry to maintain an illusion of swift success in the war, and the fact that that illusion was so easily dismantled by their underestimation of the power of television journalism (at the height of the Tet Offensive no less). The incompetence of the US in Vietnam says less about its tactical mistakes and more about its inability to accept accountability to the public after more than two decades of perpetuating that sense of American exceptionalism.

(IMO of course)

The Americans won every battle and killed far more Vietnamese. The problem was that they had no clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish, so the war just dragged on until public opinion basically forced them to withdraw.

>"I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work."

LBJ and the military industrial complex.

>They assassinate Kennedy.
>LBJ creates a false incident at Gulf of Tonkin
>massive ramp up of military in Vietnam.
>muh domino theory to excuse it all
>military is handicapped the entire war because soviet and chinese are in north vietnam. USA doesn't want china in the war or the soviets invading europe.
>military industrial complex makes fucking bank
>war gets extremely unpopular due to new levels of media coverage.
>democrat party melts down
>nixon has to escalate and expand the war to force the north to the peace table.
>watergate. democrats get congress in the midterm election
>congress violates treaties and pulls all material support to the South.
>north invades years after the peace treaty was signed
>south is fucking shit because of corruption
>boomers continue to go on hating the war, the veterans, etc

>the US is some kind of superpower?
Natural fortress, European refugee scientists, more natural resources and topsoil than pretty much any other country, all their rivals fought each other several times.

Honestly, if that place wasn't full of Americans, they would be richer than Norwegians, have no enemies and work three days a week.

>outdated weapons
when the war started, the ak47 out performed the US infantry standard m1 carbine

Fuck off Socialist.

>Afghanistan/Al Qaeda and success used in the same sentence

Not to mention they're trying to buddy up to us due to China acting like they own everything in Asia.

The US used the M14 rifle at the start of the war, not the M1 carbine.
They quickly replaced that with the excellent M16.

Liberals, blame them

Without them, the US would be raising the flag in Hanoi but no, thanks to liberals, Vietnam went to shit, and it's still shit, it could have become North/South Korea type of situation but no, the whole nation became shit, everyone there hates the communists and loves America, France (and Japan for some odd reason)

But hey, if they had won they war, I'll be there working in a Nikes factory for 12 cent a day or working in automobiles if the country becomes South Korea 2.0 instead of shitposting in America

Thank you liberals (I'm not a fucking boat person)

they let north vietnamese immigrate?

Fuck no

They let Veterans of the South and their immediate families immigrate, gave amnesty
My Gramp spent 9 years in a commie gulag to be here, I'm amazed he survived

Thank you Reagan

My friend's dad spent 14 years in reeducation camp and all his friends got shot trying to eat rats.

Crazy shit. The USA really dropped the ball, we kept pussyfooting around trying to find the balance between BTFOing the commies, saving face at home, and preventing a chinese/soviet invasion. The terrain and morale were terrible too.

Ho Chi Minh was a sellout though, he was a national hero for BTFOing the french but there was the very real fear in the south of being re-colonized by chinks through gommunism.

I think you mean "without the Soviet nuclear deterrent"

In 1959 the few US in-country advisors were using local weapons.

>people actually think Vietnam was a military defeat
I hate the US as much as the next guy,but you can't deny that USA had enough power to genocide every songle vietnamese without even using nuclear weapons, the only thing making vietnam a defeat was public opinion.

Believe it or not, victory in warfare has a lot more to do with capturing and defending strategic points than just killing a bunch of guys.

Because it was only a failure if you buy the bullshit propaganda surrounding it

U.S. war aims were to stop the spread of communism in Asia.

They kind of met those goals, although there was a bit more communism leeching into neighboring countries after Vietnam.

The war also got China and the USSR into red hot competition, and China invaded Vietnam 7 years after we pulled out, scouring their reputation.

Now, maybe even better could have been done without the war. I'd say it's true. The war was also fought shittily.

But, Indonesia did't go commie, Thailand didn't go commie, the Philippines didn't go commie, Malaysia didn't go commie, etc.

When the war started those all seemed ready to collapse. So maybe the war bought time for them.

Laos and Cambodia became full on communists.

Indonesia and Malysia didn't matter because they hate commies and the USA (you niggers supported Israel). They were Third World Neutrals.

Chinkdom and Ivan were long at loggerheads before Vietnam war.

US War Aims in Vietnam did jackshit,

>looking at [the Vietnam War] objectively
are you literally retarded?
>they only fought to bail out the french
wat
>communism spreads to laos and cambodia, so how can the US be a superpower
how can a nation with over 20% of both the world's economy and military strength be a world power for allowing communism to spread to some parts of SE Asia


Take a break kid. Go outside, play, get some fresh air or somethin

Pretty much this. From what I've been told by Viets whose parents lived through the war, the main goal was to unify the country, and so be it if that had to be through communism. Now Vietnam has a more selective brand of communism, in which those in good with the government can own nice stuff and most others are left with very little.

So?
The M1 carbine was not the US infantry's standard rifle.

You don't have to kill a soldier to remove him from the fight permanently. In fact not killing American soldiers was probably the best thing the Vietcong could do because then they go home and act as a rallying point for anti-war factions.

Retard alert.

1. The US didn't use nukes or send over 15,000,000 troops and conduct a massive blitzkrieg invasion because it feared Russia would get involved.
2. The US pretty much only had "sweep and clear" orders. Not conquering territory in the sense of traditional warfare.
3. The Vietnamese had a jungle and underground tunnels as their home turf, which neutralized a lot of American tech like tanks and planes.
4. The Vietnamese had AK-47's which were superior to the M-16 in wet, jungle combat.

>mostly because ho chi minh was a based nationalist leader like Tito rather than a Soviet puppet like Kim il sung

You what? He supported the crushing of the Prague Spring by the USSR, toed the Comintern line on almost every issue of international importance and was a devout Communist

I don't know why people still fall for the "reasonable nationalist that only turned to the USSR because he was spurned by America" line

>4. The Vietnamese had AK-47's which were superior to the M-16 in wet, jungle combat.
No.

The Vietnamese used the time honored strategy of sending waves and waves of people at the enemy until they get irritated and you win. On a purely tactical level, the Vietnam War was much more a disaster for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it was for the USA. The reason why it was an embarrassment is because the war itself was pointless and stupid.

If the americans were like the Assyrians or something and conducted complete total war where anything goes, they'd win no question.
But that's not how the world works. As much as some don't like to believe it, there's a moral compontent to this. The reason they lost was because they lost support from the american public, not because they lost militarily. What an absolute shit thread OP.

I don't know, didn't the Assyrians have to suppress rebellions once a decade in every city they conquered?

On a military level, the Vietnamese had the advantage of being able, to some extent, to control where and when they could fight. Of course with the firepower the US forces could muster the Vietnamese casualties were pretty high, but as Ho Chi Minh said himself: "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." The communists had the home advantage, each soldier knows what he's fighting for (whether it's communism or a unified Vietnam) and is willing to die for it. Compare that with the mindset of the average American soldier in Vietnam, thousands of miles from home with public support crumbling around him. It's obvious who's going to give up first. This was only made worse by the fact that the US public were told they were winning until the images of the Tet Offensive burst onto their screens. It was the first war where the public was vividly aware of the brutality of the conflict. The second the US decides to draft middle class, liberal, anti-war college kids into their military is the second they've lost the war. Not only are the kids against it but their mothers too. They've seen the images of body bags being loaded onto helicopters in the news and now it's their turn? The untouchable middle class? How on Earth are they going to support a war like that?

The majority of American soldiers sent to Vietnam were volunteers.
Draftees were most often stationed to West Germany.

That's a good point, most were volunteers, but there was a very vocal minority who weren't. Even though most draftees wouldn't see action in Vietnam the very principle of drafting them meant the war lost massive amounts of public support.

little of one little of the other

I mean the guy made sure that China and Russia gave only the minimum aid throughout the war to make sure they didn't become another France/US.

though yeah I guess I am giving him too much credit.

I wonder how China lost in Vietnam. I mean it didn't have the "bleeding heart sympathies" or the "take over without actually conquering" setbacks that US and France had. Why were they repelled?

Imagine if Wilson had listened to Ho Chi Minh at Versailles.

Didn't the Chinese army get defeated in normal battles, not prolonged guerilla combat?

Well, to be honest the US never should have gone there to begin with. First off, like a lot of other anons said a big part of it was that the US had no clearly determined aims (the main reasons were to help the French and save Vietnam from spooky communisms), just a lot of worry about the retarded "domino theory". Apart from that, US command was dumb as hell, wanting to fight a war of attrition in a proxy war, in an area where the enemy used guerilla warfare effectively, in jungles where the US had poor knowledge of the terrain, in a nation where you couldn't be sure which Vietnamese were secretly against you. Further, the US military depended heavily on air support and strategic bombing, which is fuckall difficult when you can't see shit through the jungle. Enter Agent Orange. Things may have started turning around a bit had the US switched to a more appropriate strategy but instead the US populace got pissed about My Lai, Agent Orange, and getting their US fudge packed by little Asians. All this together, morale was bullshit.

It's honestly a little surprising it didn't go worse.

An addendum.
This shit is mainly why the US switched to a policy (until recently) of only attacking when there is no possible way to lose, especially places wide open for bombing campaigns.

The US won the Vietnam war

America's army was made to go against big armies

Small armies are either so small that either fighting them is overkill or so chaotic that you can't really find a victory condition

Like how is the War on terror going to end? death of all muslims? all middle-easterners? every terrorist ever? conquest of the region? the building of puppet govs that create more resentment and thus more terrorists? stable govs that due to popular demand will try to fuck over the west in every turn? giving in to what the terrorist want and stop exploiting their oil and remove all western influence? how is this gonna end?

Was it the relative inexperience of the Chinese army then?
A country with almost no real experience trying to invade someone who'd spent a couple decades figuring everything out the hard way?

The War on Terror mess is what (until recently) refers to. I agree with you.

>Americans wasted thousands of lives in a brutal conflict against a country that had nothing to do with them at the behest of France
>A country that would then turn around and spit on their efforts and mock them relentlessly
>Meanwhile half their country was desperately trying to convince their government to get them out of an unnecessary conflict and their media did everything in their power to confound the efforts of the US military

How the fuck could they have won? Even if you buy into the whole "Americans are baby-eating monsters" ideology they're not going to endlessly napalm the entire country, and by the time they pulled out Vietnamese civilian casualties had reached absurd levels and US political and cultural support for the war was non existent

Because China was big, not well supplied, trained, motivated, or equipped.
The same reason they lost the Korean War (and then were able to recover during the initial ceasefire, reform into a defensive posture and stalemate using superior numbers to overwhelm attackers with counterattacks from positions very hard to take from the front but easy to retake from the rear)

Once their initial steam ran out they faced poor logistics, questionable training, lack of strong motivation and were fighting a foe with better weaponry (Vietnam received the cream of the crop of Soviet weaponry, the Chinese did not and at this point China and the Soviets had a deep rift between them)

The Chinese did kill more Vietnamese than they lost, but unlike the US where it had a 7:1 k/d, the Chinese only had a 1.3/1 k/d. The fact is they really got their rears handed to them by a small, determined battle hardened force and were not winning much more than phyrric victories. The war quickly became not worth it.

Vietnam also utilized all the goodies that the Americans has left the South.

Why was the Vietnam Conflict an embarrassment user? South Vietnam was created as a state with a treaty to prove it, US military killed about a million Viets, and got away scott free from the area afterwards.

Doesn't seem like a lost especially since Vietnam is sucking up to the US.

In this post, two statements are ended with question marks.

They weren't a threat before, numbnuts. Nothing was accomplished.

And then you'd piss off China and/or the Soviets and start WW3, good plan.

A war has military objectives. The US failed theirs. North Vietnam achieved theirs. HOW does your mind magically turn this into a US victory?

>You need to kill an entire villaige to make sure an insurgency cant rise up in that area
Trotsky is that you?

Mao purged the shit out of the Army during the Cultural Revolution and had stellar generals like Peng Dehuai behind bars or farming away in some camp.

Guess what happens to the army.

>>death of all muslims?
Nah, death of several hundred million and mass-scale imposing of puppet governments upon the surviving muslim states.

>>giving in to what the terrorist want and stop exploiting their oil and remove all western influence?
This will never happen. Oil is too vital for energy security and our influence isn't something we can just shut off.

Congress.

Guerilla warfare wasn't effective, it amounted to fuck all, Vietcong was thoroughly crushed and vast majority of the war were massive air campaigns, not paranoid soldiers getting sniped by le spooky pajama men in the jungle. Stop getting your history from Oliver Stone movies.

Correct TEXT:

WHO WOULD WIN:

1. The entire Vietnamese People including 13 million people willing to sacrifice their life for the independence of their country and willing to overcome internal political division in the face of a foreign enemy.

2. A largely drafted and unwilling US military in combination with increasingly hostile public opinion and wavering hypocritical political leadership