Please try not to be condescening. It is beneath you, _JS.
Some rambling may be in order. First, it should be noted that the Viet Nam War was not a mistake; it was a campaign of attrition made necessary by the ultimately successful strategy of Containment. We had no interests in Viet Nam per se other than denying the South as expansion territory; had the North Viet Namese not been Stalinist (and later Soviet) clients, it wouldn't have mattered too much to us who controlled the old provinces of Tonkin, Anam, and Cochin China; and once communism ceased to be a world threat (ceased so thoroughly that there is a generation and more who never understood that it WAS a world threat, and many of those who now seem so bold cringed at thought and blubbered that it was better to be Red and Dead, and better to live on our knees than die on our feet).
America can be a good friend (I said WE CAN BE not that we usually are, sad to say). Had we merely toppled Saddam and got out, who knows what might have hapened in Iraq? But we will never know now. We are good at winning peace. So much better that it's amazing how many seem to prefer war when it is not in our interest.
Back to Vietnam. Our efforts to isolate the population from guerrilla forces by relocation were reported in the press as deportation of peasants from ancestral lands of many generations. In spite of these and similar US handicaps, and in part because of the losses of the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong had largely been eliminated as a threat. Our "incursion" into Cambodia had so weakened the North Vietnamese forces that we were able to return nearly all the combat troops to the US, leaving behind mostly supply and liaison forces. As you may know, the first assault by the North Vietnamese was handily defeated, with the second succeeding because we removed all support. Yet antoher instance of politicians micromanaging events.
Now many folks take it for granted that our military mistakes caused us to lose in Vietnam. Many pundits and politicians talk knowingly about "another Vietnam" without bothering to characterize the way in which they see a similarity.
The point to be made here is not whether we won or lost in Viet Nam. The point is that We (the People) let ourselves be manipulated by the press into accepting at face value something that may or may not have been fact and in doing so, allowed ourselves to desert an ally who we had promised to defend; And we are getting ready to do it again.
Few seem to understand what really happened in Viet Nam. We had won in the same sense that we had won in Korea; stabilizing against infiltration and having built the South to capability of resisting invasion provided we gave support. The press never seemed to understand that, and Jane Fonda sympathizers didn't want to understand. We abandoned our allies to the tender mercies of Tonkinese invaders with communist ideology. Then the dominoes fell, as predicted, and Pol Pot took charge in Cambodia. By then Fonda was concerned with slaughter in Africa or somewhere.
One key to effective intelligence is to understand who the enemy is. It is quite one thing to be looking for insurgents with ties to the local population, and quite another to be looking for invaders from the north.
I will point out that after Nixon's inauguration and the reorientation of our strategy to "Vietnamization", the US was able to clean out the infiltrators and close much of the border, so that invasion by infiltration was no longer a viable strategy; which is why the 1972 campaign of invasion by armored corps. Insurgency was defeated at Tet.
There was no more active recruiting of local Viet Cong. Many NVA units had been sent into the South, and it took time to eliminate them partly by starvation, partly by combat, partly by amnesty -- a lot of them just gave up -- and all that tended to be exponential, so that by 1971 it was no longer possible to mount any serious operation by infiltration. After that it took armed invasion. But during 1968-1971 there were many battles; and it was never made clear to the US that we were winning.
Of course, most of the media and the academics in the US insisted that the Viet Namese War was a "civil war" and that is why we could not win. If you assumed that, then you would assume that if we could eliminate the insurgents we would win. Given that everyone was insisting that it was Civil War and nothing else, why is it astonishing that many including in the military believed it, and thus said that once the insurgency was over the war was over? But in fact that was never true. There had always been infiltration. The problem was that those of us who insisted all along that this was not Civil War but Invasion From The North could never get much of a hearing.
Now any analysis of insurgency and invasion by infiltration needs to look into the matter of Sanctuary areas. Clearly it is quite difficult to stop infiltration if there are major sanctuary areas to which the infiltrators can withdraw and which are safe. Now both sides in that war had homeland sanctuaries: we didn't bomb the USSR where their tanks were made, and the USSR didn't mount attacks on Detroit (we destroyed Detroit with Free Trade, but that was later and another story). But so long as the DMV and north was safe territory, it wasn't possible to stop infiltrations. Once the Sanctuaries were no longer safe, infiltration stopped.
Regarding what intelligence we got and ARVN got: of course no one in his right mind wanted to be an US informer while the enemy could get to him and his family. Why would they? Keeping the population safe from the enemy is difficult. It was a bit easier, later, in Cochin China among the Chinese ethnic populations since infiltrators stood out, but protecting the population so that the price of cooperation with the government is no longer a horrible death is an important objective; and it is not reasonable to expect much cooperation so long as battalion sized infiltration units are operating. But infiltration can be prevented by closing borders; sanctuaries can be bombed; sponsors of infiltration can be punished; infiltration routes can be interdicted by air power and Spectre and electronic fences in conjunction with air power.
That is quite different from insurgency. The war changed fundamentally after Tet. It is interesting that US history doesn't seem to include any study of that, yet it is key to understanding what happened in Viet Nam.
If we could get Iraq as stable as Viet Nam was after Tet we would be a long way toward victory. If Iraq could be stabilized against insurgents and the enemy action reduced to infiltration we would be able to win and win big, with an exponential in our favor. But if we do not see the difference, and apparently few do, we truly are doomed.
Also --
So, after Tet we had won the war, and everyone but the New York Times understood that; surely MI did? And after 1972-1973 it should have been obvious to everyone that (1) there was no civil war, (2) South Viet Nam was about as well governed as any nation in that region -- certainly as well as Taiwan and approaching Singapore, and no worse than South Korea under the early regimes following the Korean War's termination, (3) the only threat to South Viet Nam was invasion from the North, and (4) invasion from the North could not succeed if we gave the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam the supplies needed and air support.
So, the North Vietnamese evidently believed that by spring of 1972 their strategy had succeeded. They believed that the United States was no longer capable of supporting South Vietnam. They then selected a new center of gravity – the destruction of South Vietnamese Armed Forces – and once again massed their forces to assume the tactical offensive. On 29 March 1972 North Vietnam launched what was to become known as the Eastertide Offensive. It becan with an armored attack across the DMV. Leaving two divisions on Laos and one as a strategic reserve, North Vietnam committed some 12 divisions – a total of about 150,000 men – to the attack on South Vietnam. Supported by tanks, heavy artillery and mobile antiaircraft units, they had some initial success. But they had severely miscalculated both the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Army and the ability of the United States to react. As President Nixon said, “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.†By July 1972, the North Vietnamese had reverted to the tactical defensive. Their attempt to mass had proven disastrous – again over 100,000 battle deaths.
Note that this was in 1972, and it was an invasion from the North, not some kind of insurgency or guerrilla warfare or civil war. This was flat out invasion by World War II sized forces, equipped with Soviet trucks and armor and ammunition; and the result was total defeat for the North (many fewer than 50,000 of those sent south ever got home again) and a total VICTORY for the United States and our South Vietnamese allies.
Why would anyone call this a defeat for the United States?
Because, of course, in 1975 the North did it again. Not an insurgency, not a guerrilla war, not a civil war, but a flat out invasion by more than 12 divisions, a World War II sized operation; and this time, instead of supporting our South Vietnamese allies, the United States, on orders from the Congress of the United States, did not give any air support and limited our materiel aid to twenty (20) cartridges and two (2) hand grenades for each South Vietnamese soldier. South Viet Nam accordingly fell, the United States bugged out with the pathetic scenes of escapes from the roof of the embassy and pushing helicopters off the decks of carriers to make room for incoming. We bugged out, and the Reeducation Camps, Boat People, Killing Fields, and other horrors began.
_JS: But we were not defeated. We withdrew on orders from the Congress. That wasn't defeat.
The last time we engaged in Viet Nam we, with our South Vietnamese allies, won a great victory.
Breaking an alliance with phased withdrawal is not defeat. It only feels that way. Perhaps it ought to feel that way -- but our troops were ready to engage the advancing North Vietnamese armored divisions. They didn't cut and run. They were ordered to stand down and watch the slaughter of their former allies and friends and soldiers they had trained. -- Col. Harry G. Summers On Strategy
And that is why understanding what happened in Viet Nam is important. Those who cannot remember history...
'Nuff said. For now...
