Why did the US lose the vietnam war?

>it ain't me starts playing

The latter is half truth. South Vietnam was in a really bad spot after the Paris Peace Accords. They didn't control most of their land and they were wholly dependent upon the U.S. for support. They were in a HORRIBLE and nigh unrecoverable position. While major North Vietnamese offensives didn't come until late 1974, there were minor ones and the South came up short every time. These minor offensives were to test whether Ford would act or not as promised. When Ford asked Congress to act after being constrained from unilateral action through the Case-Church Amendment. On top of this, they actually reduced funding for South Vietnam so "a bullet for a bullet" was no longer coming. When the North Vietnamese saw this, they went for a major offensive. Ford desperately pleaded with Congress to intervene or at least increase funding so the South Vietnamese could at least TRY to defend themselves. Congress again declined. ARVN morale was gutted, they were running out of ammo and ordnance (iirc by March of '74 artillery crews were limited to one or two rounds PER DAY) so many of them just ran. The South Vietnamese WERE stabbed in the back by the U.S. congress, but otoh they were in such a bad position it probably didn't matter anyways.

Lastly, there's the Marxists. The Marxists see it as a product of class struggle and a great victory for the working class. They believe the U.S. lost because the proletariat rose up against them (at home and in Vietnam) and the U.S. was incapable of squashing two proletariat uprisings at once. As always with Marxist historiography, there's always the aspect of truth in it, but it requires a lot of straw grasping and ignoring other facts.

If anyone is interested I can recommend good overarching books on the big three schools (Liberal/Military/Marxist).

Pls gib books, more knowledge is always good.

>What do you mean by lose
Failing to achieve any of your main objectives and having to withdraw after hundreds of thousands of casualties.

I'm curious as to where you'd put someone like Nagl; that the U.S. military was quite bad at the sort of limited war it was being required to fight and while was killing a lot of people, wasn't actually advancing U.S. political objectives.

Asian insects don't value life.

youtube.com/watch?v=ec0XKhAHR5I

I just wrote a 14 page essay about this.

TL;DR French people don't make good countries. You need a good country to win a war. South Vietnam never got good.

>Liberal School
America's Longest War - George C. Herring
(even with the school bias, Herring's book is the best entry level book into Vietnam, imo)

The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War - Neal Sheehan, E.W. Kenworthy, Fox Butterfield, Daniel Ellsberg
(Great collection of primary source documents. HOWEVER, they are cherry picked)

>Military/Conservative School
Vietnam: The Necessary War - Michael Lind
(Lind is not an accredited historian, but this is actually a good book)

Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 - Mark Moyar
(More Scholarly, goes more into challenging the historiography of the Vietnam War, so definitely don't start here)

>Marxist School
A People's History of the Vietnam War - Jonathan Neale (Real entry tier shit meant for normies)
Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience - Gabriel Kolko (More scholarly)

Keep in mind these are just the big schools. There's also Capitalist revisionists, dolchstoss types, etc.

You're referring to How to Eat Soup, right? None of the above. He draws from Realist and Revisionist schools and doesn't fit neatly into any. He DOES lean more in favor of Military revisionist, though.

>no Karnow

but why

>Why did the US lose the vietnam war?

The deal that the U.S. / S.Vietnamese governments were offering the people, was a shittier deal then what the Communist were offering.

Of course nowadays, the Vietnamese are back in the same boat they were before the war, as Communism has collapsed and they need Western dollars to function in a Westernized global world.

And ironically, the approval rating of the U.S. in Vietnamese society nowadays is among the highest in the world, as the Vietnamese are scared (quite rightly) of the Chinese taking over everything.

Because America decided to upheld a silly modern thing called "human rights" and didn't simply napalm the entire country. It pisses me off that modern combat doctrine does everything half-assed. Overwhelming force and superior weaponry is useless if it isn't used. Afghanistan, Libya, Syria: you half-ass a few drone strikes, pissing the locals off who then breed terrorists, instead of blowing up any and all opposition. Either don't go around policing the world, but if you do, do it properly. This counts for most western militaries, right now.

>just kill them harder lol

This doesn't really work in counterinsurgency.

Source: Poland, Yugoslavia and Ukraine during WW2, French Algeria, the Soviet-Afghan War, El Salvador, Kosovo.

Two reasons: first, his book doesn't fit into school interpretations. Second, while it is a good overall book on Vietnam, it's not exactly entry level and Karnow misses quite a bit despite how large the book is.

>The deal that the U.S. / S.Vietnamese governments were offering the people, was a shittier deal then what the Communist were offering
It really wasn't. The Communists never did come through on their promises to the VC (such as land reform) which was already going forward in South Vietnam.

Also Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Angola, Mozambique, and so on

Yes, I was referring to How to Eat Soup with a Knife primarily, although he does touch upon the subject in a few other shorter essays.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, I don't really study Vietnam as such very closely, but at least from what I got from your post is that the core of the military/revisionist school of thought is that it was a classic asymmetric war, and that America was either unable or unwilling to commit to the level that would secure victory.

I would have thought an argument that structurally, the U.S. military was unable to undertake the task required of it because of things like poor doctrine and poor understanding as to how military and political objectives interact beyond "Killing their shit harder is better, right?" would be more aligned with the Liberal Realists; that this particular war was unwinnable with the conditions on the ground, if not for the usual Liberal realist reasons.

Yeah, but the Karnow version has so many cool anecdotes.

>so I was sleeping in downtown Saigon when I heard a massive explosion
>at this stage in the war, the VC couldn't attack this close to the capital, so I went outside to see what was going on
>I see two fighter planes leisurely circling over the presidential palace
>the police are going apeshit and driving around aimlessly at top speed
>the local civilians aren't paying any attention
>they were still stopping at red lights and everything

It's been a while since I read How to Eat Soup (probably 5 years or so) so I honestly can't comment on the nitty gritty details of the book. From what I remember, while Nagl criticizes the military for "failing to adapt" (despite most of the book drawing on '68 forward and criticizing an adaptation that came after the VC were wiped out) he mostly criticizes Washington for really disallowing it as well. I would have to reread it for a better analysis. I DO remember reading a military journal article which compared Nagl's recommendations to French tactics and they were close enough that the tactics likely would have been a disaster, but who knows. The shit didn't happen.

> The Communists never did come through on their promises

Sure, because it’s a shitty system doomed to fail but at the time, it sounded better then what the West was offering;

“Hay guys, us 1%ers and Americans will own everything and you can bust your ass for us all day erry day. So grab a rifle and fight for us!”

America was offering essentially the same old colonialism the Vietnamese had before, (just in English this time instead of French) while the Communists were at least promising something better.

>Hay guys, us 1%ers and Americans will own everything
>America was offering essentially the same old colonialism the Vietnamese had before
That's wrong, though. South Vietnam was undergoing land reforms to enfranchise South Vietnamese peasants at the request of Americans. The "It's literally the exact same as the French, except they're American" was Vietcong propaganda.

>South Vietnam was undergoing land reforms to enfranchise South Vietnamese peasants
>undergoing

Read: trying and failing because the French left a totally broken government behind when they left.

>trying and failing
>nearly a million hectares redistributed in a single year is a failure
That is also wrong. The land reform went extremely well. In fact, the reforms distributed more land to South Vietnamese peasants in one year than the North Vietnamese reforms did in over 20 (which makes sense when you consider most upper echelon members of the party were wealthy land owners). Again, you're spouting VC and NVA propaganda which has no actual basis in history.

>A land reform program called Land to the Tiller was implemented in South Vietnam on March 26 1970

Oh, I thought you were talking about the stuff in the 60s.

The stuff in the 60's was equivalent to the North Vietnamese program in the 50's desu.

Nixon

> S.Vietnam was so great, it wasn’t worth fighting for

The majority of Vietnamese were pro-communist, as they were promising them something better then they had before.

>The majority of Vietnamese were pro-communist
No, the weren't. They just wanted a united Vietnam. When it came time to collectivize, the South Vietnamese told Hanoi to fuck right off.

We got bored and just kinda left

lacked the conviction to win

Watergate

Nixon and Watergate caused the Democrats to win the midterms. Democrats in congress decide to fuck over Nixon, in retaliation for watergate and Nixon's fucking with LBJ's peace process. So they violate our treaties with South vietnam and the paris treat. They pull all the material support for the South Vietnam military.

Neither Vietnam had really stopped fighting either. When the north finds out the south is alone. They go full in on conquest. Two years after the peace treaty, the south fell.

Yeah leftist Marxists within the USA really did a number on the American people. Using the college generation as their shock troops

No home support whatsoever, after the tet offensive lack of support was even more glaringly obvious and even some of the vets that came home protested the war

It was assumed they could just be carpet bombed into submission without actually using another nuke

And a general underestimation of the viet cong and north plus their willingness/ability to fight and then not really adapting to the situation fast enough

>we didn't lose we just retreated/gave up/pulled out/et cetera

Then we failed to accomplish any of our objectives by involving ourselves if you want to desperately hold onto "we didn't lose" you can't deny we failed to accomplish shit

t. burger with a super sized father and three freedom fry uncles that where in the war

>No home support whatsoever, after the tet offensive lack of support was even more glaringly obvious
Funny since the lack of support only came AFTER Tet and even then it hovered around 50% until 70 or so.

Democrats. We lost because of Democrats and thier deplorable excess of feelings.

We didn't. The goal was to deny Vietnam as a valuable ally to China and Russia. Hence why we considered the nuclear option. Ya don't do that if you are trying to save them.

But winning is even worse. It's nicer to say we lost than to admit we didn't give a fuck and actually won by throwing and drafting our men into a meatgrinder just to deny Vietnam as an ally and to make a point that anyone messing with our allies would be bombed into the stone age.

So, while we won, it's worse than if we just lost because winning says a fuck of a lot more.

We lost because of Operation Linebacker. Prior to OL most of the aid provided by the USSR and PRC to the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam was in the form of business, not grants. The DRV-N had to go begging for help, as fishheads and riceballs only go so far when trading.

Ol changed this. Now you had a situation where the DRV-N could offer something priceless to the Russians, namely the chance to shoot down B-52s and FB-111s along with other aircraft. The two bombers were the most valuable as they were designed to drop nuclear weapons on the USSR. Now it was the Russians going begging, as in "Please please please can we help you shoot down those planes?"

Just as valuable, or more so, as the target practice, was the resulting debris and the aircrews, which were the same people trained to drop nukes on Russia.

The DRV-N captured an intact, flyable FB-111 along with its aircrew during OL and traded it to the Russians for 18 months worth of credit for supplies. Over time they sold enough parts of shot down B-52s to the USSR and PRC they were each able to reconstruct one. Both these countries bid against each other for captured American aircrews.

Absolutely none of this is right. The Soviets were training and arming the North Vietnamese for free from day one of the U.S.'s full involvement. Operation Linebacker was also not the first operation where B-52s flew over North Vietnam. They flew over during Rolling Thunder (albeit less often compared to F-4 and F-8 F/Bs as Rolling Thunder progressed). They were also shot down in South Vietnam by NVA forces manning Soviet SAMs during Operation Arclight. On top of this, Soviet trade with Vietnam DECREASED during Linebacker because of Pocket Money and Detente. You got fucking schooled already by posting this shit in a previous thread. Please do not make me school again you for posting it twice.

Rolling Thunder was much less predictable and more infrequent. Debris and crews from Arclight were much harder to come by as they fell in the Republic of Viet-Nam. Probably 80% of Russian aid to the DRV-N was paid for, and the rest as grants. Aid increased after Ol obviously, not during. Time lag.

>Rolling Thunder was much less predictable
The bombing paths were pre-set and continually used unlike Linebacker.

>Aid increased after Ol obviously, not during
Aid continued to decrease.

So the americans lost hard, that's what you're saying?

>G-germany won ww1 and 2 military wise
>they lost p-politically