the Vietnam war was fought without any kind of conventional body armor

This
Proper firefights were often at ranges that rendered ballistic protection mostly ineffective, so infantrymen on patrol were basically handicapping themselves by wearing it.

didnt the airforce also take massive losses against vietnamese pilots?probably just material tho.

even the most modern body armor cant stop rifle,even assault rifle,rounds.its all about shrapnel and maybe pistol caliber.

it must have been horrible to be a pilot, then having your plane damaged, you jump out and right into Vietcong hands, who instead of killing you, torture you for years

>even the most modern body armor cant stop rifle

Nope. Modern armor plates stop small arms up to 7.62, and even .50 cal at long ranges.

they could have, it just probably would have lead to nuclear war

They took losses from Soviet-supplied SAM batteries, mostly.

>plate carriers can stop .50 cal
No way. I'd believe most assault rifles, but there's no way it's stopping a .50.

The body armor used by modern western infantry in existing theatres of war like afghanistan are quite capable of stopping rifle rounds at the ranges they're usually fired from.
firefights in vietnam were nearly point blank, VC and north vietnamese knew that closing range meant closing the gap between both forces capabilities. Y'know, they weren't the most accurate shooters and were quite capable of getting super close.

Look it up yourself.

Not all armor is made the same, and there are, indeed, plates that when used with the standard kevlar vest material will stop the fuck out of a .50 at long range.

That's amazing.
I remember the average age of a ww2 soldier was 30, the average age of a vietnam vet was 19 or something. I have the ages wrong but you get the idea.
Isn't body armor a meme vs modern weapons anyways?

Does it actually apsorb the shock too, or do your organs still get scrambled?
I don't really bealive you anyways. Unless you mean super long distances.
Also you are never going to get hit with just one bullet in real warfare, so it better be able to stop auto fire bursts or it's still a meme

Not all, taliban soldier are str8 up amazed by american being able to take bullets and then still be able to walk the fuck out of a firefight.

The ribs take the damage first, take a bullet to armour and you're gonna crack a few.

>Also you are never going to get hit with just one bullet in real warfare
Thats what you almost always get hit by, especially at long range

>Does it actually apsorb the shock too
Nope.

>I don't really bealive you anyways. Unless you mean super long distances.
We're talking like 600M.

>Also you are never going to get hit with just one bullet in real warfare
Wrong. Every gunshot wound my company sustained in Iraq was from single round impacts. The cone of fire and beaten zone from automatic fire expands exponentially with range, and the shittier the gunner, the wider that cone of fire and beaten zone will be.

>Every gunshot wound my company sustained in Iraq was from single round impacts. The cone of fire and beaten zone from automatic fire expands exponentially with range, and the shittier the gunner, the wider that cone of fire and beaten zone will be.
I was about to say that
I like you, if you're ever in Edmonton I owe you a beer

Why the fuck do you morons insist on stating your shitty opions on topics you know nothing about?
R33333333333333333333

600meters is over 6.5 football fields. Okay, yeah, I bealive you

>Also you are never going to get hit with just one bullet in real warfare, so it better be able to stop auto fire bursts or it's still a meme
Why do people try to speak with authority when they have no idea what they're talking about?

If you are wearing plates then you're not going to even get bruising unless the round is more substantial than what the plate could normally handle. With soft armor I honestly have no idea, that stuff is primarily made for pistol rounds or to be worn in conjunction with plates.

>With soft armor I honestly have no idea,

Think getting hit with the peen end of a ball-peen hammer. You can end up with anything from broken ribs, sternum, to bruising, depending on the round and where it lands.

pic related

>also take massive losses against vietnamese pilots
No. The vast majority of losses were against SAM and AAA sites staffed by >10,000 Soviet """"volunteers"""". The Vietnamese DID have more aces, but in the U.S.'s defense, it was to be expected that a smaller air force going up against largely unescorted bomber raids would have higher chances of pilots getting multiple kills than fighter-bombers and multirole craft getting multiple kills against small intercept forces.

>inb4 extremely outdated equipment
Contrary to popular belief, the Vietnamese were using either immediate last gen or current gen Soviet tech while the US was (with admittedly some exception) using previous gen tech until after Tet as the new stuff was going to Europe since the early Vietnam era saw a LOT of Soviet troop movements and posturing towards the West. The M60 Patton, for example, never saw any use in Vietnam despite far more suited to the types of tank skirmishes seen in Vietnam compared to the M48 (better stabilizers, better optics, actual night equipment, etc). The USAF also didn't employ TAC or CAS bombers early in the war because they were quite literally unavailable due to how the USAF was structured. This was due to the fact that the USAF centered itself around SAC. There are a few good articles and dissertations on this available for free through various .mil sites. However, I highly recommend this one: oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA39389

Fuck, looks like the link is dead. Here's a citation of the article for those interested:

Dill, Maj. John D. Political Restrictions on Operational Fires in the Post World War II
Environment, (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: School of Advanced Military Studies United States Army Command
and General Staff College, 2001)

Maybe try plugging it into Google Scholar and see what comes up.

>the USAF centered itself around SAC.

Crazy how we used to have nuclear bomb equipped bombers in the air flying 24/7, 365, for years, just waiting on the word to head to the U.S.S.R..

The cold war was fucked up.

That's amazing. That just shows how important general intelligence levels in a country are, because midlevel burocrats can make or break entire empires very indirectly.
Sort of reminds me of Japan and Manchukuo, and their projecting a future fight with Russia for forever and as far back as 1920 realizing they needed more sheep to make x about of winter gear and that anxiety (indirectly) leading to them to expand elsewhere

Even crazier is the fact that when it came time to actually use those bombers in a conventional role that didn't involve nuclear weapons, the White House said: "Fuck that, you're on CAS duty and btw you're not allowed to use those guided bombs that we specifically designed for you 20 years ago to use in situations like this. Have fun."

In the case of the air war, it wasn't midlevel bureaucrats. It was Johnson and McNamara directly intervening (which McNamara was admittedly qualified as he played a very large personal role for the logistics surrounding the Japanese bombing campaigns in WWII but he didn't contest LBJ and instead just kowtowed). The funny thing is that when the U.S. became involved in the conflict, Johnson specifically asked the Joint Chiefs what their air plan was so they could carry it out as soon as possible. They produced one the following day and Johnson scrapped it in favor of the clusterfuck that was Rolling Thunder which he dictated himself DAILY. DoD didn't get to run the war they wanted until the 1972 Easter Offensive and when they did it was shockingly (actually pretty unsurprisingly when you consider that they were playing to the strengths they knew they had) effective.

>inb4 that one autismo that thinks the Linebacker campaigns were a disaster comes out of the woodwork to get BTFO for the 5th fucking time

>the Vietnam war was fought without any kind of conventional catapults

>wasn't midlevel bureaucrat
But it was, just not the way or the ones you are thinking

youtube.com/watch?v=oSGvqjVHik8

? The US didn't torture Vietcong soldiers?

this is more common in war than you think

people would often put arrows and bullets in latrine pits and corpse just to cause infection. Main reason why Europe first banned "chemical warfare"

Vietnam war is basically like Britain in the revolutionary war

>started for economic reasons
>won pretty much every battle but still get dicked around by guerrilla warfare
>people back home supported the enemy side
>torture all around
>supported by large-ass other power
>every time you leave an area you taken over the enemy just took it back
>loyalists do jackshit
>only thing it really hurt was your pride at the end because you still take over the world later

>Dude just use heavy bombers from the Philippines for combined arms air support lmao
>The VC will still be there after the 13 hour flight, right?

Americans were dumb

did they learn NOTHING from the mongols?

STEAM, NOT DIGITAL

>"WaW! WAW!" -cried the spoilt uneducated American person
Next thing they gonna say "US outkilled enemy 15 to 1" or "We kill 3 mil VC lololol"

>mfw vietnamese are fallout 4
youtube.com/watch?v=w0TsVMqsI-o