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I know this idea has been done to death, so if people want to link to other threads that is fine, but my brother just watched century of warfare and he spoke of how the Japanese easily occupied French Indochina by taking over the cities and installing puppets. Yet, the US spent years doing search and destroy missions to no avail.

Could the US win the war if they directly attacked North Vietnam and sought to occupy North Vietnamese cities? If the US did this, wouldn't China occupy North Vietnam? And, if so, this surely would not make North Vietnam happy to have the Chinese running things. It would seem to me that drawing China into a "Warm war" similar to Korea, with more conventional troop movements would have resulted in stalemate and played the US strengths. Plus, it may fundamentally eviscerate the North Vietnamese power structure to be under Chinese occupation. Thoughts?
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