Why did America lose the Vietnam War, Veeky Forums?

Why did America lose the Vietnam War, Veeky Forums?

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Couldn't go hard because of fear of WW3 with USSR and/or China. Going soft wasn't hard enough to win.

Democrats voted to stop support to South Vietnam
We had a "bullet for bullet" policy which prevented the south from falling, but as soon as we stopped, the north overran it.

Why would you want to kill cuties like this?

That's the reason they lost

we exiled dr Manhattan

Superior Vietnamese commitment outweighed superior American material resources.

A huge amount of reasons
>US military was held back by politicians who didn't want things to escalate into a potential nuclear conflict or another long term total war
>US grunts were younger than 20 and mostly unhappy to be in Vietnam. Most US soldiers were just counting the days until they'd get to leave and wanted to survive until then - resulting in a fractured fighting force. Conversely, the VC were a highly motivated fighting force which knew the territory.
>The support given to the Viet Cong by the USSR and China is seriously understated.
>Viet Cong soldiers and South Vietnamese soldiers were basically identical to US soldiers, which seriously impeded the US military's counterinsurgency operations.
>South Vietnamese leadership was very unpopular, making it difficult for the US to establish a stable regime which could have resisted the VC

It was a shit show that will eventually be remembered as what incited the beginning of the end of the United States.

oh this thread will be delicious, can't wait for the massive amount of american tears and rationalizations

She'd be way cuter if she kept her brown-yellow tan. Fucking ugly ass "white" bleach.

>mfw I'm putting off writing an essay about this exact topic by posting on Veeky Forums

Okay, for the United States to win in Vietnam, one of two things has to happen.

The North needs to give up, or the South needs to shape up.

The North isn't going to give up unless they outright run out of soldiers.

Ironically, this nearly happened. After they won, they freely admitted that they were within two years of running out of men.

In order for the South to "shape up," that is survive the communist onslaught without constant infusions of American blood, the Southern government needs to not be hideously corrupt and widely loathed.

This is unlikely, for the simple reason that the government in the South was created by Frenchmen. From Ap Bac in 1973, to the Easter Offensive in 1973, ARVN performance ranged from bad to abysmal. The further up the chain you went, the more likely it was that the officer simply bought their rank, and intends to use that rank as a way to squeeze money out of the system to make up their initial investment.

The United States committed to a conflict where the Vietnamese ultimately chose whether the US won or not, and the Vietnamese weren't cooperating.

Men, most of Asian women will have that skin if you keep them from the rice fields

[spoiler] at least we impregnated some of their women before leaving [/spoiler]

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Having your countrymen killed and gassed by the thousand shouldn't be considered winning.

I want to thank you for saying how little thought has been paid to exactly how much and how high tech the arms the VC were getting. Alot of times when I try to tell people that the VC were in possession of state of the art SAM batteries and often the trains that were transporting Russian made weapons to the VC, were pillaged by the Chinese, because the contents were so much better than anything they had.

We didn't.

The Democrats lost the Peace two years later because of Watergate ass pain. They pulled all the support for South Vietnam. Which allowed the North of steam roll the South.

bad reasons (Vietnam had been fighting what it saw as oppressors for long before and after the Americans), lack of dedication, lack of support, etc.

JFK was killed as a direct consequence of the war

got some sauce for that?

War is a political tool, one that can't really fight political zealtory, Treaties ended world war 2, not trying to blindly fight germany down to the last man.
Beyond that the populace of America wasn't for the war, and due to the mechanisms of democracy, pissing off the electorate is never a good idea.

Basically this. We had won the war and forced the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam, and then congress decided to stop supporting the South Vietnamese government.

youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk

>that will eventually be remembered as what incited the beginning of the end of the United States.
It started in the 90s really

The Germans killed more Soviets but the Soviets stil won WW2

I meant, the recognition that the US empire entered into irrecoverable decline with the Vietnam war

Same reason they didn't win the Korean war.

>North Korea didn't take South Korea
>Mission successful.
>Take North Korea.
>Lose North Korea.
>1 outta 2 ain't bad.

>we had won the war by every conceivable measure
Except the was well known that the people of South Vietnam and North Vietnam hated the corrupt christian South Vietnam government. Yes, I emphasise christian because they would suppress the ~90% percent Buddhist population and their freedom to practice religion. The war was lost on moral standing point and popular views. Only measure of win was through superior hardware and bombs US could drop. With no moral backings and no support from the population of either US or Vietnam (both), the war was all but lost. The accord was measure for Americans to exit out of the war without being seen as a loser.

>PragerU
>oh does the U stand for University?
>Nope. Its a conservative "alternative news" channel
kek

>and forced the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam,

Ummm the day the Paris Peace Treaty went into effect over 35% of South Vietnam was in NVA control.

many many reasons but above all they committed the cardinal sin of warfare, they did not understand their enemy

they never once stopped to consider why the viet kong were actually fighting, and never realized that the Vietnamese never saw them as valiant liberators defending there freedom, but merely the next group of militaristic colonizers bent on controlling vietnam

also they had literally fuck all idea how to fight an insurgency

Yes, that's why we signed a peace accord which left teritory in the hands that held it, when the NVA occupied close to 1/5 of South Vietnam.

What the fuck do revisionists like you even get out of posting such blatant nonsense?

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Pride

Democracies can't win against insurgencies.

>I've never heard of the Malayan Emergency.
>I think that autocracies do so much better, like Saddam's Iraq against the Kurds, or the Soviets against the Afghanis.

crazy how they push backed the north from pusan

Sure they can.

A moral society can't win against insurgencies.

I mean, no one outside madmen will ever be "happy" fighting a war, but what changed from WW2, were people would go and fight for their country? Was it the lack of a clearly defined enemy (not thjat communism and the VC weren't defined enough, but fighting the jap and the hun were pretty iconic)? Not wanting to relive the horrors of WW2?

Nobody could figure out why the hell the US was involved in Vietnam in the first place.

Combine that with the fact that they couldn't see any returns whatsoever for their investment in Vietnam, and you see people start to get antsy.

Not even that. A society can be very moral and defeat an insurgency. What you can't have is liberal morality, the morality of human universality and tolerance.

You need to be able to say and really believe in your heart that you and your countrymen are one type of man, deserving in every way of the utmost moral consideration, while the enemy is another type of man, wholly outside of the scope of the morality you apply to your own fellows.

I fail to see what your point is. Against all odds, the South Koreans and the US and co. pushed the communists back over the border.

>against all odds
When the push back started, the SK and its allies had much more than NK had. NK only had about 100 tanks at the time when SK was being pushed. Then "against all odds" SK had about 500 tanks and roughly twice as many troops and suddenly they pushed back.

>Most US soldiers were just counting the days
Most U.S. soldiers were volunteers, not draftees.

Because they didnt invade the north and american will failed before vietnamese did

except they did not

The Vietnam war was a North Vietnamese victory. The USA was not on the side of North Vietnam

USA lost strategically but war. They 'lost Vietnam' the same way as they 'lost Cuba'. USA didn't lose on battlefield. Sorry for analogies. They just left the place because they was fucking tired, because of cost/benefit ratio. You would not say that Britain 'lost' to India and naked Ghandi poo-not-in-the-loo gangs.

War has an objective, they failed to secure the communist takeover. Hence they lost.

Battlefields, ammunitions, bombs, etc are all tools of war. So too are press, propaganda, public opinion, etc.

US failed to secure the soft tactics and lost the war.

Waging a traditional war for the first half of the war then suddenly remembering that they're fighting against an asymmetric insurgency and adopting a counterinsurgency strategy.

Plus the draft and the political shit at home. America should never have been in Vietnam.

US failed to achieve their objectives, North Vietnam succeeded in achieving their objectives. Ergo, the US lost the war.

Vietnam was about rubber
Once synthetic rubber was discovered the war in Vietnam ended quick

Read "The Army In Vietnam" by Andrew Krepinevich

They didn't lose. The U.S simply lost interest.
Check the k/d ratios of the Vietnam war.

U.S casualties - 58,000.
Vietnamese casualties - millions.

Americans are lazy, weak and soft.