No Vietnam War

One thing is that it might actually hurt the US military. Vietnam was vital to changing the US Army, Air Force and Navy. Add a slower development of weapon systems in the 80s.

Considering the war was a total loss for the US prestige, these factors are insignificant. In addition, fighting the war cost the US a tremendous amount of development money, which meant a lot of advanced systems were cancelled.
 
No vietnam war means the great society programs are supported instead. As the money that went to the war can be used for this instead.
 
For SE Asia there is a fork. A. things continue as OTL & the South falls before 1970 & is incorporated into a greater Viet Nam. The Pathet Lao force the pro western government into exile. The Cambodian monarchy reaches a accommodation with the Khmer Rouge, but eventually ends in the 1970s.

B. is the Diem regime is either waived away, or takes a course that does not enable the revival of the Viet Minh as the Viet Cong. Absent a revolt & a less dysfunctional government S Viet Nam turns into one of the Asian Tiger economies in the later 20th Century.

What happens to Heroin production in the Golden Triangle I cant say. It would be a good thing if the drug is a lot more expensive and less available in the US in the 1960s & 1970s.
 
No vietnam war means the great society programs are supported instead. As the money that went to the war can be used for this instead.
The War ate more into NASA than the Great Society spending
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Considering the war was a total loss for the US prestige, these factors are insignificant. In addition, fighting the war cost the US a tremendous amount of development money, which meant a lot of advanced systems were cancelled.

Indeed. I disagree about the idea that Vietnam really had a positive impact on Army development, because when it comes to the gear Vietnam wasn't really relevant as Europe was to be the main theater of conventional war. The US didn't need to go to Vietnam either to understand that things like the Sheridan or the M114 were total duds (that was known in CONUS and Europe already). However, it might not have shown yet that pilots and in general all members of the armed forces needed better training in some areas, though things like the Israeli-Arab wars would have shown how useful training was.

Now, when you compare that to what the US missed militarily because of the war, you can clearly that its enormous cost in money and prestige had a far worse negative impact. I think that the draft was already on its way out long before the Vietnam war shattered public support for the Army, as higher levels of equipment sophistication required an overall far better trained force anyway, plus the draft was never really a popular nor all that useful post-Korea. However, the war meant that discipline was seriously degraded for a while and that the professional army didn't find a high number of volunteers for some time. Avoiding the war could probably allow for a smoother transition to a high-tech professional army.

Equipment wise, while the US was still on its long path of issuing unrealistic requirements and designing gear of very questionable quality regardless of whether a war was on or not, the fact that much of the budget was spent on fighting the war and that a lot of equipment was lost still meant that the Army was not in a great situation during the period.
No war could have allowed for the planned 1965 overhaul of M48 Pattons to a pseudo-A5 standard (M68 105mm gun and diesel engine) to take place, and would have meant that the US would most likely have continued with separate MICV and recon vehicle programs, meaning that the XM-800T ARSV would have entered production in 1975 instead of the M3 Bradley in 1981. This could also have allowed the USAF to step up the guided weapons' program.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
B. is the Diem regime is either waived away, or takes a course that does not enable the revival of the Viet Minh as the Viet Cong. Absent a revolt & a less dysfunctional government S Viet Nam turns into one of the Asian Tiger economies in the later 20th Century.

I don’t know why Diem gets so much blame when the situation in South Vietnam objectively deteriorated after his assassination. Before Diem, South Vietnam was run by crime syndicates and nefarious pro-French elites without an ounce of loyalty to the country. Private armies run by religious sects and crime syndicates roamed the land. Thanks to Diem’s efforts, the South Vietnamese state successfully established its full sovereignty and independence from France and also centralized power in Saigon, allowing the state to focus on fighting communists since all other threats had been handled.

After Diem, South Vietnam was run by a series of generals who only lasted a few years at most before being overthrown by a new set of generals. None of these generals accomplished anything except losing more ground to the communists and becoming more dependent on America.
 
I don’t know why Diem gets so much blame when the situation in South Vietnam objectively deteriorated after his assassination. Before Diem, South Vietnam was run by crime syndicates and nefarious pro-French elites without an ounce of loyalty to the country. Private armies run by religious sects and crime syndicates roamed the land. Thanks to Diem’s efforts, the South Vietnamese state successfully established its full sovereignty and independence from France and also centralized power in Saigon, allowing the state to focus on fighting communists since all other threats had been handled.

After Diem, South Vietnam was run by a series of generals who only lasted a few years at most before being overthrown by a new set of generals. None of these generals accomplished anything except losing more ground to the communists and becoming more dependent on America.

Kennedy's supporters in academia wrote the history books, but yes Diem was by far in away the least bad option we had and if we stayed with him we could and should have avoided Americanizing the Vietnam mission and kept it a lead from behind mission the public would have supported. He was doing more right then wrong in terms of his learning curve he was actually improving with time. Bribe the relatives State was unhappy with to vacation a few years in Europe at the beaches, but the coup was madness.

The NY Times and certain other papers weren't happy with the situation and if anything overplayed the crisis in the South and directly linked them all to Diem in their own bid to try to right the ship, but there was no obvious replacement and they really turned things to hell and pushed Johnson to Americanize the war which Westmorland had the entirely wrong idea on how to fight.

Someone really should have sent all America's top generals in Vietnam books for Christmas on how MacArthur's father spread out his troops in jungles of the Philippines and worked with locals and built up paramilitaries. Much of the problems of the insurgency in the late 50s and early 60s was even at the start we were advising the ARVN to do all the wrong things when it came to waging the war of the flea because they were treating the conflict as Korea or WW2 only on a smaller scale and that is not hot to fight an insurgency.
 
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nice graphics. vietnam war + man on the moon + great society = end of $-gold convertibility and big inflation of the 70's. Maybe without vietnam this would have been delayed some years....

Without Vietnam War the US would have been "City upon a hill" for a generation of young people. The impact of Vietnam War had a very large impact in Europe and began an era where US and USSR were largely treated as moral equals upon minds of general public. Without Vietnam but with Prague Spring the US would have had a clear moral superiority in fight of hearts and minds.
 
Vietnam caused such a scar on the American consciousness and confidence in our military that the U.S. only engaged in an official ground war once over a span of twenty-six years, and that was a brief intervention on another country's behalf that kept the dictator in power anyway. If it weren't for 9/11, I bet this cautious foreign policy goes on for even longer.

Without the Vietnam War, that effect is completely erased and we probably go on another adventure in its place. Possibly Iran in 1979, if the hostage crisis takes place as OTL, and the Middle East would get very messy quickly; more so than it already was. The lives that were devastated after the Vietnam War instead are damaged here, or maybe some other conflict.
 
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Is Nixon elected in 1968, if he isn't running on his secret plan to end the war? For that matter, what kind of platform does Goldwater run on in 1964?
 
That means that the US needs to resist the temptation to hand out millions of prizes in 66 or 67 as the PLAF and NFL expand and succeed.
 
Simple really, if you're going for a pre-60's POD yet post 1950, the whole country would still be divided between the North and South, though hostile to each other to an extant; that and the USA wouldn't have Vietnam syndrome which would butterfly away the likes of media that featured or dealt with the Vietnam War (No Rambo, Apocalypse Now, etc. and also no Ikari Warriors and no Ralf and Clark in King of Fighters and Metal Slug), that and public trust in the government would be higher than OTL for a while in the 20th century.
 
How about alternate US brush fire wars in 60s if Vietnam was not invaded ?

US intervention in the middle east?

Colombia. 18 million people, worse terrain than 'Nam, direct threat to Canal Zone.

[ "Monkey paw, I wish the US had stayed out of Vietnam..." ]
 
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Without Vietnam Australia would likely not replace the Centurion tank, or transfer the helicopters from the RAAF to the Army.

In the broader sense the defence policy of the 'expeditionary' powers from the late 50s was nuclear and minimum conventional deterrence in Europe coupled with fighting limited wars, Britain even explicitly stated these wars would be fought in the Far East. I think it is likely that without Vietnam the US gets involved somewhere else in Asia to contain communism in line with widely accepted defence policy of the time.
 
Kennedy's supporters in academia wrote the history books, but yes Diem was by far in away the least bad option we had and if we stayed with him we could and should have avoided Americanizing the Vietnam mission and kept it a lead from behind mission the public would have supported. He was doing more right then wrong in terms of his learning curve he was actually improving with time. Bribe the relatives State was unhappy with to vacation a few years in Europe at the beaches, but the coup was madness.

The NY Times and certain other papers weren't happy with the situation and if anything overplayed the crisis in the South and directly linked them all to Diem in their own bid to try to right the ship, but there was no obvious replacement and they really turned things to hell and pushed Johnson to Americanize the war which Westmorland had the entirely wrong idea on how to fight.

Someone really should have sent all America's top generals in Vietnam books for Christmas on how MacArthur's father spread out his troops in jungles of the Philippines and worked with locals and built up paramilitaries. Much of the problems of the insurgency in the late 50s and early 60s was even at the start we were advising the ARVN to do all the wrong things when it came to waging the war of the flea because they were treating the conflict as Korea or WW2 only on a smaller scale and that is not hot to fight an insurgency.
Well the problem is the difference is the Philippines dint have a large army on its northern border ready it invade to reunify the county, that was a bigger problem I think, one can fight a gorilla war, one can prepare for a conventional war, one can't do both at the same time.
 
Colombia

[ "Monkey paw, I wish the US had stayed out of Vietnam..." ]
Since the US skipped militarly intervening in South and Central America from Eisenhower til Reagan did in Grenada, don't see why anything more than OTLs supporting Rightist Dictators would be needed in that time frame.
 
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