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This idea came from the Famous People without Vietnam thread, and some things touched on in there.

Vietnam had a large effect on American warfare and the US military, both obvious and in ways many may not know. It created and utilized new strategies, created Generals and military me out of individuals who would have had far different lives, led to the usage of new weapons of war (and allowed those new toys to be ground tested) and so forth. It also showed the flaws in American strategy, the problems with a belief that conventional warfare was over by this point (this is the reason pilots lacked dogfight training, which wasn't amended until into the war), the inability to deal with a guerilla war, and other problems which led to various revisions. But what if, for whatever reason, Vietnam were avoided (the specifics are not important)? What would happen to warfare, the instruments of war and the military in the decades to follow?
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