How the fuck did the US lose the Vietnam War?

Unclear mission objective and plan for success with growing disinterest back home.

Parts of the Army did, mainly aircav and airborne.

>How to Eat Soup
>Soup with Knife
What is this?

A pop history book designed to correlate failures in the Middle East with failures in Vietnam through confirmation bias and otherwise ignoring differing situations. It's recommended by pseuds on Veeky Forums because they don't know any better and it fits their confirmation biases as well. Funnily enough, there are thousands of free essays and theses on Vietnam publicly available through various U.S. .mil extensions about what worked in Vietnam and what didn't.

Are you familiary with the history of the war? The Treaty of Paris ended the war and all the US troops were evacuated. The North invaded again and there were no US troops to stop them. Watergate was going on at the time so noone really cared and the US just never went back.

Let's not forget that the NVA was occupying a big chunk of South Vietnam at the time the Treaty of Paris was signed, they weren't obligated to go back, and you know, everyone knew that it was a question of time before invasion round 2.

It is pop history, but just being so isn't an automatic invalidation. It's well accepted in COIN circles because it provides laymen and prospective students with a good and accessible introduction to the problems of COIN in a modern context, despite its shortcomings for seasoned students.

>but just being so isn't an automatic invalidation
Correlation of two separate events with completely separate failures makes it automatically invalidated for any historical worth. There's a reason it's not academically accepted, despite your claims to the contrary. It's accepted by people like you stated: the laymen, the ones who don't know any better. It has the worth of a Bill O'Reilly history book. It's coffee table filler for pseuds like you.

>Correlation of two separate events with completely separate failures
Not the guy you're talking to, but it in no way correlates the two. The only case studies are Malaya and Vietnam.

You should look into why the book was written. That was literally the purpose for it.

>It's accepted by people like you stated: the laymen, the ones who don't know any better.
I said it was accepted for use for them, as an introductory textbook, like teaching Weber in a social science curriculum or Plato in a philosophy curriculum.
Their shortcomings are obvious, but that's part of the point, it's a matter of engaging students in the topic in away that's accessible to them, that is both informative both on a works merits and on its shortcomings, which you've of course mentioned.
I mean really, if you're teaching an undergraduate or introductory course on the matter, are you gonna start with Galula?

No amount of military effort would have resolved that situation in our favor. It was simply a military solution applied to non-military problem.

Whenever a distant foreign power projects its will against another nation with the intention to change the will of its people, rather than simply wipe them out, said distant foreign power has a very narrow window in which to achieve this, if it uses military force to do so.

The window is measured from the time it takes to start killing the people in power who disagree with you, and closes when you've killed so many people that the entire nation does.

In Vietnam's case, that window was but a few months long.

After that window closes, there is no military solution. The more people you kill, the more enemies you are going to make, and the further into the grave you bury your own cause.

By the end of the first year of the Vietnam war, we were being shot at by just as many non-VC as VC. We'd killed too many people, and blood just cries out for blood. It wasn't too long before we were even bringing previously extremely unpopular communist sympathisers in neighboring nations into power. (The Khmer Rouge never would have come to power without our serving as a rallying cry.)

If we were just there to kill all the gooks, it would have been another story. But we weren't there to kill, we were there to convert.

That *should* have been done in the much more subtle and clandestine method that certain members of the CIA were advocating: Back door funding, PR, recruitment, framing the communists, etc. in order to make the Vietnamese think they had made up their own minds.

But certain individuals just had itchy trigger fingers and wanted a chance for "Korea done right", thus we false flagged up a war, and employed the military for a job they were never designed to do, despite the fact that we had a perfectly competent spy and intelligence network, who coulda done the job right (or at least stood a chance).

US had no business there in the first place so hippies were in the right.

>US had no business there in the first place
The U.S. had no business supporting ideological and regional allies (at their continual request) in a fight that very much fell under U.S. foreign policy at the time?

French faggots got us involved in French Indochina.

A fact people forget quickly.

>meanwhile in the Nixon white house

You could have walked away at any time, but you did not.

>Instead of letting Vietnam claim independence, you financially and materially supported France in the war.

>Instead of letting things be and allowing the Viet Minh to reunify the country, you insisted on having it divided and supporting a separate regime in the south.

>Instead of letting a corrupt and not very competent regime collapse on its own, you encourage a coup that installs an even more corrupt and incompetent regime.

>Instead of letting South Vietnam fend for its own, you escalated your involvement until you were all but fighting an undeclared war.

Very carefully

Nixon and Kissenger conversations were the best.

Mostly weakness and corruption. The weakness of the US government that put in strict ROE's and didn't allow for a proper level of aid to South Vietnam. The weakness of the US public that undermined the war effort. The corruption of Congress that abandoned south vietnam in the face of the NVA's final offensives.

Morale

They don't have drones back then

America ran out of will before NK ran out of men

Wrong war kiddo

They probably learned that it's no big deal to not keep promise since it was USA puppet that fucked up and lied about the election result in the first place.

How the fuck did the Brits lose the American Revolutionary War?

There wasn't a stable government for us to back. It was filled with corruption and Diem ruled harshly. The NVA were willing to fight down to the last person while US troops just had to survive for ten months and then go home.