Reality is that half of 'South Vietnam' wasn't even Vietnamese. We had the truth on our side and didn't even utilize it.>Start spreading 'propaganda' among the North Vietnamese about non-Kinh majority land in South Vietnam>Eventually offer the North Vietnamese the ethnic Kinh majority areas of South Vietnam on condition they stop all support to the Khmer Rogue with the remaining territory becoming a pro-U.S. rump state>Keep up a heavy bombing campaign in the meanwhile>Sow division between moderates and hardliners; everyone's willing to be bombed to liberate their Kinh brethren but not everybody's willing to be bombed to conquer and colonize Montagnards and Khmer>Almost guarantee an agreement and loss of future will to fight>Offer Cambodia the Cambodian parts of the liberated territory as a prize for defeating the now supportless Khmer Rogue to better motivate them>Lose the Vietnamese coastline but can resupply by air or through Cambodia>Maintain a foothold in southeast Asia and southern 'Vietnam' (including at least two cities; Pleiku & Buon Me Thuot) as was the original objective of the war
but the Americans did win
>>65273565That's retarded. The North Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh didn't care about ethnicity, they were involved in the war to support the NLF, who wanted to end South Vietnam's corrupt feudal, patron based government.If anything, the conflict was based more on religion than anything else. The Catholics were fucking awful at governing and some of them would have preferred to purge Buddhists rather than fight the NLF.South Vietnam was a doomed state, no amount of US support would have saved it.
>>65273565Vietnam was impossible to win because south vietnam was a massive corruptocracy. They were simply unable to mount effective resistance on their own due to internal thieving.
>>65273600>The North Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh didn't care about ethnicityThat only proves the effectiveness of my strategy, dummy.
>>65273607Which is why you make a new rump state based on ethnic lines. South Vietnam without the South Vietnamese government.
What would have happened if there hadn't been those failed policies—such as the strategic hamlets and the repression of Buddhism—prior to the full-scale escalation of the war?
>>65273611The US tried like 6 times to coup the South Vietnamese government because they were so corrupt lmao, it never really worked that well because the foundation was pretty rotted by then and because the coups made the situation more unstable for SV>>65273614Short term success but long term probably the same failure. If you want to win Vietnam you'll have to stop the draft and the television from ever nuking American public opinion and stop the war from ever cascading into the clusterfuck it became. If we told France to fuck off and didn't get caught holding the bag we would've had a good chance for Vietnam to be nominally aligned with us somewhatThe real getting off point was the Gulf of Tonkin, anything after that sealed the US into becoming stuck in such a conflict. If you had to be stuck with south Vietnam you need a coup FAST after 1954, not waiting until 1963. A complete reshuffle in 1954 could have changed things
>>65273565Was always curious why my Thai buddy had a Lao accent until he showed me where he grew up on Google the one time. His families rice paddies are like a stones throw from Laos.
>>65273565Unless your goal is only to delete populations, to smash military formations, or to damage infrastructure, there is no way to "win" a war without conquest, and conquest is total anathema to the post WW2 mindset. Modern man is so horrified by the concept of conquest it's difficult to even exaggerate.
>>65273565Wild hypothetical time: via sideways pussy magic, Vietnam Cambodia and Laos form a mildly pro-Western republic in 1948 that functions moderately well. How much of a military power are they in 1975?
Just occupy the whole country and not the only south. Go all in or don`t go at all.
>>65273614The problem lies in the South Vietnamese Catholic bourgeoisie and their utter domination of the country following the partition. They grabbed on to power and never let go, turning the south into a literal feudal state where the treasury was kept afloat by US aid allowing local government to pilfer taxes, manpower, and funding however they pleased as long as the junta in Saigon got a cut.Honestly the most painless way for it to have ended would have been either for Ho Chi Minh to have convinced the west that he'd be a chill moderate like he was always trying to do (never going to happen because the French were so analy ass-blasted about losing Indochina that they were blackmailing the US threatening to withdraw from their NATO obligations if they didn't order concessions that the French approved of) or a Pol Pot-style NLF somehow managed to come to power and ordered the execution of anyone who knew what France was.The rich one percent that dominated Vietnam under French rule wanted to live like kings, and honestly their one mistake was keeping up the delusion that the US would always throw money at them. A communist uprising was inevitable, we only just kept pushing it along.
>>65273565by actually invading north vietnam and laos in 1965
Why did the US manage to win in Korea but not in Vietnam?Both conflicts are kind of similar.
What a dumb post
>>65275117there's a lot of reasons, but mainly because china/north korea were willing to negotiate. mostly because we went on the offensive and kicked the shit out of them first, but still.
>>65275126>>65275118
>>65275118>Both conflicts are kind of similar.Except not
>>65275130Both conflicts are in Asia.Both were about North commies against South capitalists
>>65275126 Korea was fundamentally a conventional interstate conflict while Vietnam was a counterinsurgency war with a conventional layer on top,
>>65275139yeah. though it got pretty conventional sometimes.
>>65274721This but two wars ago in Germany
>>65273588Tell that to the 58,281 dead
>>65273565>How we could have won VietnamJust let the CIA carry on their shit for another 10 years.
>>65275694Tell that to the 600k VC who died as well.
>>65273565LOL, imagine having lost the Vietnam war that it lives so rent-free in your head that you plan out fantasy scenarios like this. Couldn't be me.
>>65273565Easy. Immediately support Ho Chi Minh when he asked for US backing against France. Threaten to stop giving free money to France unless they hold an independence referendum in Vietnam. This will stop Ho Chi Minh's leaning to Russia and instead keep him a centrist. This will force France to withdraw and prevent the partition of Vietnam. Once this is achieved, pour money into Vietnam and buy out all the nationalists and or assasinate all the commies. Then the US will have what is essentially a client state.
>>65275750>Immediately support Ho Chi MinhHCM was already an established hard core communist before WW1. Stop with this revisionism. He also actively purged the actual nationalist factions. At most, he only larped as a nationalist to get some support
>>65273565Losers in VietnamLosers in Afghanistan Losers in IranLosers in UkraineLMAO
>>65273600>The North Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh didn't care about ethnicityThey absolutely did, anon. That's why montagnards unilaterally supported French/US troops and got the Xinjiang/Gulag/Auschwitz treatment from the Vietnamese once the whites left.>>65275750>Easy. Immediately support Ho Chi Minh when he asked for US backing against France.Anon, look up that dude's life (western-sourced, not the fairytales fed to the locals) because you've clearly never read up on him. That dude was a hardline believer in communism to such an extent you're unsure if he's number 2 after Lenin or fucking Karl Marx himself.His request at that point was not a single drop less of a farce than Putin's requests towards the US today. A way of mockery that he was all to familiar fighting for the extreme left in France, Communist Comminterm in Russia/USSR, CCP in the Chinese Civil War and finally even back home.By the time he and his goons held power, it was realistically already too late.
>>65273588Somewhat making friends decades after you got your ass kicked is not the same as winning the war.
>>65273608It means your strategy is fundamentally ineffectual.>>65275968>That's why montagnards unilaterally supported French/US troopsYou got it ass-backwards. It's the French and US who cared about ethnicity, insofar as that they instrumentalized the montagnards to sow division. The North Vietnamese didn't give a shit about it either way and just fought the montagnards because they were being willingly intrumentalized by the enemy - just the same as why they fought the ARVN.
>>65273565I feel like you're underestimating the usefulness of the Vietnamese, but I get your point that ethnic minorities could've been better leveraged. >Lose the Vietnamese coastline but can resupply by air or through CambodiaThe coast was actually better to keep, which is why they held on to it. It was more economically developed, easier to supply and defend, and the coastal urban population was denser and the core of the southern regime's conscription and political support (or rather tolerance, at least enough to be considered preferable to either the NLF or northern government). Vietnamese did more of the fighting, scored more victories, and racked up a greater kill count than US or minority forces and fought until the formal surrender. >Sow division between moderates and hardlinersWorth trying but temper your expectations. The moderates were purged by the hardliners multiple times and were a non-effectual political force in the DRV, Ho Chi Minh himself was just a figurehead by the mid-60s. >>65275118Not really. It was a nearly entirely conventional war while Vietnam only fully became one at the tail end, US/allied forces arguably committed more than in Vietnam relative to the span of the conflict, and they were actually trying to decisively defeat the enemy and hold/capture territory. >>65274908>A communist uprising was inevitable, we only just kept pushing it along.Which didn't happen dumbass, everything you said is western Marxist revisionism that Vietnamese communists don't even believe. The Tet Offensive failed precisely because the North Vietnamese overestimated the actual capacity for revolutionary mobilization in the cities (i.e. fucking legitimacy) and ended up getting the NLF wrecked beyond repaid and suffered heavy losses to regular PAVN forces as well. The war transformed into a conventional conflict that was won by the North in open battle due to the PAVN's qualitative and quantitative advantage.
>>65275761But pozzia/jewssr didn't invade Vietnam and Iran?
>>65276194China invaded Vietnam and they were officially an ally of the USSR.
>>65276231...that counts, I guess?
>>65276039bodied that freak
>>65273614Strategic hamlets were the one smart decision made in the war, the not smart part was putting a north Vietnamese double agent in charge who fucked it up on purpose
>>65273565Flatten and incendiary Hanoi. Airdrop multiple brigades at the Northern Border with China. Complete blockade with sink on sight doctrine.Instrumented coups in all neighboring countries.The war was winnable, militarily. Politically it was always a shitshow.
>>65276039>>65276922Don't you have shoes to make so your kids can eat?
>>65275755Well no shit he purged the nationalist factions, they all fought against him lmao
>>65277014And then you just deal with an even bigger insurgency backed by even more of the PAVN, who are now extremely unwilling to compromise because you flattened a city
Westmoreland was adamant that he could win the war following the Tet Offensive, and he was almost certainly right. It just required three impossible things.>convince the american public to somehow be ok with the mobilization of over a million reservists to free up men for combat operations in vietnam without hampering strategic readiness>convince the american public that starting two entirely new wars by commencing full combat operations in both laos and vietnam is a good idea>blockade haiphong entirely without somehow causing the soviets or chinese to intervene in the warAssuming some magical fantasy world where all three of those things happened the war would have ended with a US/RVN victory within a year or two, at which point the US would have left the country and it would have immediately collapsed like a house of cards because the RVN was a rickety shithouse at the best of times.
>>65277152Laos and Cambodia, I mean.
>>65275118Why do frogposters all need to be euthanized?
>>65274320>The US tried like 6 times to coup the South Vietnamese government because they were so corrupt lmao, it never really worked that well because the foundation was pretty rotted by then and because the coups made the situation more unstable for SVThis wouldn't be a coup; it would be a completely new government drawn on ethnic lines.>>65274721>>65275100>>65277014Then you get a repeat of Korea with China intervening, only the Chinese and Soviets have nukes capable of hitting the United States mainland this go around.>>65276057>It means your strategy is fundamentally ineffectual.Nope; quite the contrary.Let me spell it out for you. Ho Chi Minh didn't care about ethnicity, ie Ho Chi Minh and the Kinh have no motive to conquer a South Vietnamese ethnic rump state. Meaning we maintain a pro-U.S. government within 'Vietnam.'>>65276177I'm not saying the southern Kinh weren't dedicated fighters; I'm saying we couldn't end the North's will to fight so long as we had them on our side. We could defeat their will to fight while retaining the ethnic minorities, however.
>>65275118Because the US didn't want a repeat of Korea by invading the North and having the Chinks flood the battlefront all the way back to Saigon. Also this time the USSR and China were both nuclear-armed and breaking the Paris Treaty risked a MAD response and destroying US legitimacy in the UN/amongst third world countries (back when it was actually taken seriously because they might have flipped commie)
Early ground wars in Lao and Cambodia to prop up their respective monarchies might have done it. Basically, they needed those countries to remain relatively stable and Thailand-like, but nope, they dropped the ball early. Too early.
>>65273588This is like saying Wilhelm II actually won WWI because, 80 years later, he got his integrated European economic zone with Germany as its heart.
>>65278103Correct, he did. The eternal Kraut wins again.
>>65275186We really should have fought with the Nazis against communism.Anglos deserve genocide.
>>65275761>VietnamChinks?>AfghanistanSoviets?>IranIraq>UkraineRussia?
>>65278531>another nation-devastating, generation-obliterating war twenty years later because your people didn't lose hard enough the first time>nearly erased from existence, only brought back because it suited the victors in their postwar brinkmanship with others in their coalition of convenience>nation split in two for forty years, one subjected to the soul-scouring scourge of communism, the other descending into the depths of post-modern, post-moral Western thought>obsessed with manufacturing and commerce instead of the arts or military science>oh, and before any of that, you personally, are forced to abdicate and get to spend the last few miserable years of life in exile in Holland, watching your countrymen tear each other limb from limb from afar>your monarchy, your aristocracy, everything you ever knew and loved as German not merely scraped off but dissolved with the ideological, cultural equivalents of lye, never to be restored or revivedStill won, tho.
>>65278611They're still destroying Europe even today, so his spirit remains.
Lewis Sorley and Mark Moyar both have written several works about how the war could have been "won." I haven't read their books but I've come across them before in libraries and bookstores.
