Could America won the Vietnam War?

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I remember growing up hearing about the Vietnam war from relatives and how it seemed unwinnable by design. But was that really the case?
However, I remember when my high school history teacher talked about the Tet offensive and how it was an american victory on the ground but the media made it seem like a defeat.
Could there have been a way for the United States, South Vietnam and allies to beat back the Viet Cong and to prevent the North Vietnamese invasion in 1975?
 
I always wonder if there could have been a history where North Vietnam and South Vietnam both existed in a North/South Korea type situation, hell depending on how authoritarian the North Vietnam government would have became, we might have had a unified Vietnam under the southern regime by now (although I doubt China would want to give up one of its puppet states).
 
Última edición:
Probably not. You can argue that the US never lost a battle, but it just didn't have a strategy capable of degrading the North. The US stacked bodies, but not nearly as many as it claimed. The US blew a lot of shit up, but not stuff that mattered significantly to the Norths war effort. It was a massive expenditure of money and resources that was embezzled and pissed away. More bombs, more troops, and looser ROE's probably wouldn't have changed much.

The US only wins that war with infinite time, money, political patience, and international approval.

I recommend "The Perfect War" by James Gibson for a deep (and readable) analysis.
https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-War-Technowar-Vietnam-Military/dp/0871137992
https://archive.org/details/perfectwartechno0000gibs
 
the tet offensive was a disastrous blunder for the vietcong in the south, they were in absolute shambles after it.
militarily, the burger army was in a winning position, could realistically have pushed all the way to hanoi and taken the north by force, but the political will in washington was not there. the army was winning the war against the commies on the ground, but the commies in america were winning the propaganda war at the home front, that's what ultimately decided the outcome.

the viets were very lucky that the viet commies turned out to be less of a disastrous catastrophe than the chinese and korean counterparts. they still brought vietnam dangerously close to famine with their collectivization policies, but unlike kim and mao they were sensible enough to partially revert and adjust these policies before hitting a point of no return, which allowed food production to pick up again and spared the viets the nightmare that occured in china and north korea
 
Could Britian have prevented the Japanese from taking Singapore? In theory sure, but in practice no. The US fought Vietnam in the way it did because that was about the most the US could expend. Winning the war would have involved too many sacrifices elsewhere.

DumbDude43 dijo:
the tet offensive was a disastrous blunder for the vietcong in the south, they were in absolute shambles after it.
militarily, the burger army was in a winning position, could realistically have pushed all the way to hanoi and taken the north by force, but the political will in washington was not there. the army was winning the war against the commies on the ground, but the commies in america were winning the propaganda war at the home front, that's what ultimately decided the outcome.
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If your whole strategy is winning through attrition, but the enemy is replacing losses at a 3:1 rate, then you aren't winning.
 
If the US was willing to beat China, sure.

There are many reasons though the US lost, but the key one was not wanting to replay the Korean war where China comes in at the last second on North Vietnam side to create another Korean standoff. Hence why the US was never keen on northern Vietnam offensives.

Unfortunately, without any northern offensives to bring the commie state and its resources supplying its guerilla fighters down south down the US can also not win.

The only way to win was to go in and fight China, accept another Korea situation, or fucking leave. The clowns in Washington chose to embezzle miilions in a decades long forever war and lost it all.
 
Última edición:
Sure, if it had fought offensively instead of defensively. If the US had bombed North Vietnam as aggressively as it did in Linebacker II earlier in the war and coupled that with a serious offensive north, the NVA and VC couldn't have stopped it. Not that there was a VC after Tet anyway, the NVA created a fake and gay VC manned with its own soldiers to cover up the fact that the VC got annihilated by Tet
 
The only way the US could've won the war decisively and not also had to deal with a forever war would've been to somehow stop Chinese and Soviet support.
 
Yes, the US military is the strongest military in human history and can win any war against any enemy if they really wanted to, except for the hypothetical civil war against the right-wing insurgency of course
 
It would have been very winnable, but would have required much more robust reconnaissance efforts. The Vietcong didn't really have the ability to operate in a really meaningful way inside urban areas outside of North Vietnam. This meant they mostly mustered in North Vietnam and then bush wacked to their objectives in the south. If the US had of invested more into things like Recondo, and better integrated local South Vietnamese soldiers into these efforts then they could have potentially flipped the tables on the Vietcong.

Instead they invested in idiotic wunderwaffe like the "people sniffer" which obviously didn't work.
peoplesniffer.PNG

Because you know, patrol dogs, which actually were effective don't make billion dollar corporations into trillion dollar corporations.

Ultimately the US always tries to answer tactical and strategic issues with technological solutions and that's just not doable.
 
The Easter Offensive has to be one of the most underrated events in the Vietnam War.
While peace talks were being negotiated, the commies launched a massive offensive with the explicit purpose of guaranteeing a decisive victory and getting an upper hand in the Paris Peace Accords. The commies severely overplayed their hand here and, while they managed to secure about a tenth of the South's territory, it left them crippled and nearly all of that land was taken back and their infrastructure was destroyed in the following Operation Linebacker II.
That last one was seen as such an act of brutality by the US that it pretty much turned the entire world stage against them. Commies would have been absolutely steamrolled if the war effort were to continue but what's done is done.
 
Literally all that the Americans needed was one Mark Wahlberg, and the Viet Cong would've crumbled.
 
America basically did, the Tet Offensive was the last gasp of the North Vietnamese Army and it was a horrible failure, but American pansy morale broke and so the US pulled out (military victory, political defeat).

If you don't subscribe to that theory (it's a common conservative talking point, i'm not a Vietnam campaign enthusiast so I don't know myself), the US could certainly have done better just by turning North Vietnam into paste...
 
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