Vietnam War General

The problem wasn't the lack of gun, the problem was the lack of air superiority training for Navy pilots.

Did draft dodging actually make a difference in the numbers of boots on the ground?

Also, how did media coverage differ between Vietnam and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of press freedoms?

It was justified

>new Ken Burns documentary
>Max Hastings book comes out this October
Hyped for those desu

The US managed to get half a million guys into Vietnam, so it's not like we didn't have enough people in theater to get the job done. Somebody showed Johnson a plan to increase the number to 700,000 and he told them to fuck off.

The bigger problem as far as manpower was the National Guard and Reserves, which Johnson refused to touch because so many middle and upper class families were using them to protect their children from the war.

Vietnam was basically uncensored, because imposing censorship would mean admitting that America was actually at war, and LBJ did everything in his power to downplay the severity of the crisis.

In Iraq, they sent reporters home for taking pictures of bullet holes in Humvee doors, because the command didn't want to remind the public that soldiers were doing patrols in the middle of cities in unarmored vehicles.

There's also a blanket ban on photographing American corpses now.

The ARVN is severely underrated and many units held out against superior PAVN/Viet Cong forces. They bore the brunt of the Tet Offensive and even tied down over a thousand PAVN soldiers at the Hue Citadel while the Marines fought through the city center. The individual soldier proved himself on many occasions and had many tactical victories across the South Vietnamese villages. They were hamstrung first by a terrible nepotistic president, then a series of indecisive and corrupt juntas, and finally the cutting of funds by the Americans. Although they did fail at several key battles that ultimately lost the war, they were beginning to be able to stand on their own two feet when America pulled the funding.
My own grandpa was sent into the field with 100 rounds per month toward the end of the war.
>tfw I go to the range and blow through 1000 rounds through my AR in a single day

pic related, Gramps operating with a Garand and converse high tops

It was, but it didn't work.

There's a saying that there's no such thing as bad troops, only bad officers.

Unfortunately, the top of the pyramid at ARVN was pure shit.

Also adding that the ARVN succeeded in beating back the PAVN at the Tet Offensive and Easter Offensive. They drove out the Viet Cong time after time in the early war, and they even pioneered using the M113 as mounted infantry rather than just using it to move troops in the field. One unit even managed to earn the US presidential citation for how well it performed.
Hell, at Xuan Loc, they fought to the death for 12 days against much superior PAVN numbers before they were finally defeated, finally opening the roads to Saigon.

I really liked the part of Ken Burns' documentary on Vietnam when the former CIA adviser said something along the lines of
>Americans hate losing, so we told ourselves things to try to compensate for our failures. We overly focused on the failures of the ARVN to make up for our failures in the war.

Cheers. I'd heard that anti-guerilla operations require a 15-1 manpower advantage while the US and ARVN managed a 3-1 in the early years-which was sufficient for a conventional fight. But it sounds like the guerilla side of the fight was mostly mopped up by the end anyway, guessing Tet drawing the Viet Cong into open warfare contributed a lot to that.

Crazy to think people were once tuning in to all the horrors of war at dinner time, whereas this time round you had people forgetting we were still in Afghanistan.

If ARVN were as good as their communist equivalents, the US wouldn't have needed to send troops in the first place.

Fuck, even in 1971, if they'd done Lam Son 719 correctly, they would have won the war right then and there.

ARVN had some great enlisted men, but an effective military is only possible with an effective political system to provide leadership.

What's your favorite gook slaying tune?

The thing is, the US exhausted all of America's will to fight by the time the guerrillas were defeated. Before CORDS was started in '67, the US strategy was literally just attrition.

I'd have to guess the main reason that Americans don't care as much about war as in Vietnam is because so many less people they know personally are dying.

The Vietnam era military came from all walks of life, today the US has de facto military class. The percentage of Americans who personally know an active duty soldier is a third of what it was during WW2, and like half of the Vietnam era if I remember right.

Also, we've gotten a lot better at bringing soldiers home alive. If we'd fought Iraq and Afghanistan with Vietnam era body armor and medical evacuation, tens of thousands of Americans would have died.

youtube.com/watch?v=t9eybY9qFfY

youtube.com/watch?v=_4QBhC1uCP4
I would hop in the Patton and blast this.

PsyOps > OPSEC

Been watching the Ken Burns documentary and its pretty neat but it really lack a ARVN perspective. Most of the time it just portray anything south vietnamese as corrupt and incompetent.

Did America go to war based on a lie?
How does the American government justify it to the families that lost their family and friends in the war?

>Did America go to war based on a lie?

Yes and no.

On the small scale, the Department of Defense and the White House lied to Congress about the Tonkin Gulf Incident to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed. They told the Senate that the USS Maddox and Turner Joy had just been minding their own business in international waters when they were attacked.

What actually happened is that the South Vietnamese government had a program of sending in commandos on speedboats to go fuck things up in the north. They would always all die without accomplishing anything, but it was mainly just to gesture to the Americans that they were willing to fight.

Anyway, US spy ships would hang behind these speedboats, back in international waters, to record the signals from North Vietnamese coastal radars tracking the speedboats, and to listen to radio chatter to try and figure out how deeply the Soviets and the Chinese were involved in the North Vietnamese military. The first Tonkin Gulf incident happened because the North was reacted to these speedboat attacks.

On the broader scale, Johnson was actually being totally honest when he said why he was going to war. He believed that if the US committed to defend a country against communism, and then let it fall to communism, then no country would be willing to rely totally on the US for their defense, that countries like Japan and West Germany would begin to appease the Soviets, and that the Cold War would be lost.

The Vietnam War wouldn't be anywhere near as tragic or as interesting if we hadn't gotten into it with genuinely good intentions.

To answer part two, LBJ couldn't justify it, which is why he went from winning the 1964 election with 60% of the popular vote (this is an amazingly good margin) to refusing to run for reelection as an incumbent (nobody does this.) Nixon was already ruined by Watergate before the Spring 1975 offensive revealed that Vietnamization and "peace with honor", which Nixon had sent 22,000 US troops to their deaths trying to implement, were total failures. Both of the presidents involved in the Vietnam War ended their careers in disgrace.

Afterwards, both the hawks and the doves blamed each other. The hawks blamed the doves for forcing the US military to fight with "one hand tied behind their back" and for forcing the US military to withdraw from the country. The doves blamed the hawks for getting the US involved in a war that they could never win.

If you're wondering, the doves are objectively right.

In the 1980 elections, Reagan tried to avoid taking either of these positions, and had the official position that Vietnam was "a noble cause" and that the soldiers who fought in it should be as proud as the soldiers of any other war.

Basically, no American politician wants to be associated with the Vietnam War in any way, especially in terms of taking responsibility for it.

please refrain from posting ferris, I'm doing the no fap