AHC:PRevent the AMerican "Doltchstosslegende" After the Vietnam war

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by ModernKiwi

Have the US keep to it's secret accord with South Vietnam and resume bombing the crap out of NVA forces when they invade in 1975 and keep supplying the South Vietnamese armed forces. Result: Repeat of the NVA defeats of '72/'73 and South Vietnam stays as a nation state. Therefore no defeat in Vietnam.

Sooner or later Saigon will have to fight its own battles. The USA does not have an infinite supply of ammunition or willpower to keep holding Saigon's hands and doing everything for it like the Helicopter Parent of Doom. At least a part of the thing people forget is that Saigon was not expected to collapse when it did even by Hanoi, implying that Hanoi rated Saigon more highly than most of its theoretical defenders on alternate history forums.

Originally Posted by Matt Wiser

The '72 Easter Offensive was an all-out, full-scale conventional invasion. It wasn't no guerilla uprising. The NVA were using armor, artillery, etc; 20 divisions, with 600 tanks coming south from the DMZ, out of Laos, and from Cambodia. U.S. Airpower helped blunt the offensive, but it was the ARVN on the ground that ultimately stopped it.

As for the OP's question: Have a POD of 1965: LBJ decides that he wants his own man as SECDEF, and gets rid of MacNamara (and in so doing, the whole Whiz Kid bunch as well). And he gets a SECDEF who tells him that if he wants an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam, he's got to go all-out. Cut the Trail, mine the harbors, unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam, etc. Basically, what both Westmoreland and Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp (CINC-PACCOM at Pearl Harbor and Westmoreland's immediate superior) wanted to do. None of this "porportional response" or "graduated response" (what ROLLING THUNDER started out as) BS. Either go in fighting to win, or don't go in at all.

How many wars in human history have been fought by two sides committed to a war to the last ditch and the last bullet and the last man? Almost none of them. Thus this cannot be at the root of the US failure in Vietnam, and the claim that it is has limited validity at best. Rather, the simpler view is that the USA went into Vietnam from the first without any clear idea of a strategic objective beginning with the hit on Diem and everything went downhill from there.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by MacCaulay

Say whuh? Did I miss something? I'm going to assume this was some sort of "America can't fight wars"-thing?

No, it was more that I said the Vietnam-era generals fell into the view of General Erich Ludendorff that they were never defeated on the battlefield, instead stabbed in the back by Commie sympathizing criminals on the homefront. The professionals in the military quietly reformed, improved, overhauled, and retooled the military so the whole thing worked beautifully by the 1990s, and this has been studiously overlooked in favor of the 1960s-era version of the idea that the USA was defeated by its mythological version of Ludendorff's equally non-existent November Criminals.

Given how the USA lost Vietnam and how long and staggered the process of this happening actually was, as well as the cultural issues going into the war, it'd take one Hell of a culture shift for this *not* to happen at some level. It wasn't even the entire US military, mind, certainly not the bunch that made the leap from the Hollow Army to the present version happen. It is, however, the refuge of the Westmoreland and MacArthur element.

[Killer300]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

No, it was more that I said the Vietnam-era generals fell into the view of General Erich Ludendorff that they were never defeated on the battlefield, instead stabbed in the back by Commie sympathizing criminals on the homefront. The professionals in the military quietly reformed, improved, overhauled, and retooled the military so the whole thing worked beautifully by the 1990s, and this has been studiously overlooked in favor of the 1960s-era version of the idea that the USA was defeated by its mythological version of Ludendorff's equally non-existent November Criminals.

Given how the USA lost Vietnam and how long and staggered the process of this happening actually was, as well as the cultural issues going into the war, it'd take one Hell of a culture shift for this *not* to happen at some level. It wasn't even the entire US military, mind, certainly not the bunch that made the leap from the Hollow Army to the present version happen. It is, however, the refuge of the Westmoreland and MacArthur element.

But Snake, even if the military had reformed before hand, could Vietnam really have gone better? Saigon isn't going to improve, military reforms in the US isn't going to change that.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by Killer300

But Snake, even if the military had reformed before hand, could Vietnam really have gone better? Saigon isn't going to improve, military reforms in the US isn't going to change that.

No, and this is the Catch-22 with those reforms: Korea and WWII seemed at least close enough to victory that the known to exist issues with force structure could be papered over and ignored and considered irrelevant. It took a Vietnam-like scenario for those reforms to become impossible to keep putting off, which is the whole nastiness of the situation for the USA. Improving Saigon requires more PODs than could have a stick shaken at it, and is also outside of what the OP is asking for.

[Killer300]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

No, and this is the Catch-22 with those reforms: Korea and WWII seemed at least close enough to victory that the known to exist issues with force structure could be papered over and ignored and considered irrelevant. It took a Vietnam-like scenario for those reforms to become impossible to keep putting off, which is the whole nastiness of the situation for the USA. Improving Saigon requires more PODs than could have a stick shaken at it, and is also outside of what the OP is asking for.

Additionally though, wasn't the 1990s about a war with... well, a country that had a pretty pathetic military? I mean, pretty much anyone can beat Iraq, even countries using massed wave human attacks.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by Killer300

Additionally though, wasn't the 1990s about a war with... well, a country that had a pretty pathetic military? I mean, pretty much anyone can beat Iraq, even countries using massed wave human attacks.

Iran didn't beat Iraq, it just showed much more fight against it than an Iraq with an army that knew what it was doing would have had to deal with. Most countries equipped with the most advanced armor of their time and things like poison gas against an enemy with extreme difficulties merely replacing its complex machinery of war would have simply kicked ass. At the same time Iraq *did* have the fourth-largest army in the world and one of the most powerful mechanized forces of its time. It just served as the object lesson for why quantity does not in fact always have a quality of its own.

[Killer300]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

Iran didn't beat Iraq, it just showed much more fight against it than an Iraq with an army that knew what it was doing would have had to deal with. Most countries equipped with the most advanced armor of their time and things like poison gas against an enemy with extreme difficulties merely replacing its complex machinery of war would have simply kicked ass. At the same time Iraq *did* have the fourth-largest army in the world and one of the most powerful mechanized forces of its time. It just served as the object lesson for why quantity does not in fact always have a quality of its own.

Okay, well, point is, I'd hardly call Iraq proof of US military reforms. The US in the 1960s could've crushed Iraq.

[Snake Featherston]

Originally Posted by Killer300

Okay, well, point is, I'd hardly call Iraq proof of US military reforms. The US in the 1960s could've crushed Iraq.

I would beg to differ given the degree to which the USA of 1991 displayed a fundamentally superior grasp of co-ordination between its various branches of service and all arms by comparison to the Vietnam-era US military.

[Killer300]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

I would beg to differ given the degree to which the USA of 1991 displayed a fundamentally superior grasp of co-ordination between its various branches of service and all arms by comparison to the Vietnam-era US military.

Perhaps it did, but my point is Iraq doesn't really demonstrate the effectiveness of these reforms because of how pathetic the enemy was.

I'm not saying the reforms didn't improve it, but rather that Iraq was hardly a test of that which showed those improvements. It would be interesting to see that, if instead of Iraq, the US got dragged somewhere like Vietnam again, however I have now gone wildly off the topic of the thread, so I'll stop now.

[modelcitizen]

Here's a thought:

Upon the January 1968 Pueblo incident, withdraw all US forces from Vietnam and go apeshit on North Korea.

I didn't say it was a very realistic thought. But hey.

[SeanPdineen]

Model Ironically realistic or not that would have been easier.
even Gaullest France felt Korean Indepedence worth fighting for.
Park would have wiped the floor with Kim

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

This requires major *cultural* changes as opposed to military ones. The US defeat in Vietnam was the product of a dual military reality ensuing: the USA was defending Stupid Evil from Smart Evil, and the USA was doing this without any coherent leadership among any of its branches of service and with a war whose skill in planning can be judged by the superiority of Soviet small arms over their US counterpart. US defeat was a product of the invisible sides of war like logistics and strategy, but in the visible tactical manifestation the USA invariably wins all its battles (and after a while forgets that the purpose is to save Saigon, which winning battles alone is never going to do).

In Korea, the USA faced enemies that sought to wage a conventional war of army groups and found a leader more than able to match those leaders and to outlast them in a conventional war of bodies v. bullets and bombs. In Vietnam the USA had no less than three wars at minimum, not counting those of South Korea and Australia and the USA's other allies, all working at cross purposes with each other and those of the Saigon regime. To most Americans a war where they win every battle and lose the war looks like someone was sabotaging it even when they really weren't at all and the defeat was the simple, mundane process of logistical no-win situations having their mind-numbing effect.

The bigger problem is that in the 1960s the USA was under an assumption derived from WWII and Korea that its system that hadn't necessarily worked great in either war was working just fine, as the USA at least stalemated those wars. In Vietnam when that system began to erode and blow up in the USA's face, this is the ultimate root of the Dolchstosslegende. A country that had gone from seemingly inevitable ability to turn around disaster wound up presiding over an ignominious clusterfuck and was defeated by an enemy deemed racially inferior, no less.

Avoiding the Dolchstosslegende from that witch's brew of cultural memory filtered through ideology would require quite a bit of doing.

Wow, that is a pretty damning articulation as to the U.S.A's naivetee doing us in for good and all.

[modelcitizen]

Originally Posted by SeanPdineen

Model Ironically realistic or not that would have been easier.
even Gaullest France felt Korean Indepedence worth fighting for.
Park would have wiped the floor with Kim

And, this time, we would remember to tell China that we are not crossing the Yalu River.

[SergeantHeretic]

The Art of War
He will win, who knows when to fight and when not to.
He will win, who knows how to handle superior and inferior forces.
He will win, whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
He will win, who, prepared himself, wants to take the enemy unprepared.
He will win, whose military capacity is not interfered with by the sovereign.

In Vietnam the United States, flunked five ut of five.

[modelcitizen]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

The Art of War
He will win, who knows when to fight and when not to.
He will win, who knows how to handle superior and inferior forces.
He will win, whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
He will win, who, prepared himself, wants to take the enemy unprepared.
He will win, whose military capacity is not interfered with by the sovereign.

In Vietnam the United States, flunked five ut of five.

You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run

-Kenny Rogers

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by modelcitizen

You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run

-Kenny Rogers

ANd we flunked that one as well.

[pnyckqx]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

ANd we flunked that one as well.

C'mon Sarge, you already know that NCO's are better gamblers than senior officers.

Politicians don't count because they gamble with our money (not to mention lives).

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by pnyckqx

C'mon Sarge, you already know that NCO's are better gamblers than senior officers.

Politicians don't count because they gamble with our money (not to mention lives).

Fair enough.

Of course that can be and often is an unfair prejudice labeled at ALL polititians when some of them turn out to be good eggs.

[pnyckqx]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

Fair enough.

Of course that can be and often is an unfair prejudice labeled at ALL polititians when some of them turn out to be good eggs.

Agree, but those guys usually don't gamble with our Blood and Treasure unless they absolutely have to.

[Orry]

Originally Posted by Snake Featherston

Sooner or later Saigon will have to fight its own battles. The USA does not have an infinite supply of ammunition or willpower to keep holding Saigon's hands and doing everything for it like the Helicopter Parent of Doom.

Sooner or later Hanoi would have had to fight its own battles.... The Americans stopped supporting the South before the Russians stopped supporting the North thus the north won.

Everything the North lost was replaced - this was not he same with the south even if there had not been corruption. The Case-Church amendment prohibited US Military involvement and congress slashed the level of support - which had already effectively been cut due to the October 1973 Oil price rises.

If anybody can claim to have been sold out its the South.....