South Vietnam wins

It isn't ASB.

But if you want peace governments that will leave NATO elected in West Germany, Italy, France and/or the UK, that's the best way to get it.
Well, you could just have the US military not give the media access. Without as many troops committed you can just keep it from ever going on Western News for the most part and just say anything else is Soviet propaganda. The Vietnam War is probably the only American war after 1900 that didn’t restrict journalists, so again, if we are dealing with a extremely callous US government, not that hard to imagine.
 
The solution was not military, the solution in Vietnam is never military, especially in the North. That's why the French first didn't try and then lost when they tried, and that's why the American lost. You cannot militarily conquer a country with so many jungles and mountains if you don't have the support of the population. You could try to break them but a) that'd be akin to genocide in the North and b) the South would make Erithrea a paradise in comparison as your population would be working against you.
As @Meordal eloquently explained, there was a massive fear of the communists in Vietnam, which the French used extensively. If anybody else had been standing, the communists shouldn't have been able to touch power with a ten foot pole.
But the French pushed everybody to the extreme and the Japanese purposefully sowed the seeds of maximum chaos after they left, hence the communists. But even then, many people hated the communists almost as much as the colonisers, which is why you have two countries in the first place.

The communists were opposed by the Catholics, the Buddhists, the Cao Dai, the business class, the bourgeoisie...
But Diem went with crushing everyone who wasn't Catholic. If he hadn't been that fervent, or more balanced in it, he could have gathered the support of other religious groups, which could have given him more support in the rural population.
No, or less, support in the South, and you can fully utilise your resources and actually try to take the North, if anything by getting refugees and taking the manpower away from the North, like in East Berlin.
In that situation, besides his own political skills, Diệm had to trust in his relatives, the catholic minority and the backing of his American supporters to overcome the obstacles and neutralize his opponents. Diệm's favoritism towards Catholics and persecution of South Vietnam's Buddhist majority led to the "Buddhist crisis" of 1963. The violence damaged relations with the United States and other previously sympathetic countries, and his regime quickly lost favour with the leadership of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

- Failed land reform
- Catholic minority in power
- Dependency on French and US aid (versus nationalism)
- National war fatigue
- Corruption due to factionalism and family connections
- Viêt Minh national ideology common to many citizens
- The wish to reunite the country in the hearts of all citizens
- Future junta leaders who assassinated him in his own government
- "Pro-communist" junta leaders : communist agents (or former Viet-Minh)
- Lack of international or US reactions against the coup, leading to more coups
- Destruction of the traditional anti-communist factions and social structures
 
China had it’s own issues in the 60s, they aren’t going to be able to spare food for a while. And after the Sino-Soviet split it would be easy to convince them from sending supplies. Plus, I don’t think Korea is a good analogy, the Vietnamese absolutely despise China, all a Chinese counter attack would do is give the Vietnamese a common enemy.

Soviet aid continued to go through China to Vietnam during Sino-Soviet spilt. In fact, both countries stepped up aid leve in order to out bid the other side.

Why would the North Vietnam hate Chinese forces when the US troops is at their door?
 
Every bit of Soviet Aid that went thru China was 'Taxed' with much of it diverted for Chinese use.
It was no accident that most of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact aid came thru Hiaphong, where all of that material was able to be used by the PAVN, rather than a fraction.

Mining Hiaphong would have been devastating, had it been done earlier

And risk hitting Soviet ships?
 
Chinese intervention would be great, it's not as if the spoiling offensive is going to hang around to fight them for the ground. Then nth Vietnamese have to worry about Chinese troops in their country.

As for the corruption, that needs time and development to work itself out, neither are going to happen with the war on.

What if the PLA goes on to invade South Vietnam?
 
Every bit of Soviet Aid that went thru China was 'Taxed' with much of it diverted for Chinese use.
It was no accident that most of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact aid came thru Hiaphong, where all of that material was able to be used by the PAVN, rather than a fraction.

Mining Hiaphong would have been devastating, had it been done earlier

Johnson was not to go with a campaign that included any risk on the North to force a peace and mines came with a small level of risk.

Our bombing campaign on the North deserves to be one of the biggest military jokes in American history. It was a campaign for Washington to show it was doing something not to achieve any result. There are many things we could have done between going full Korea/WW2 and the campaign we did do which was pathetic and yet North Vietnam still successfully sold to much of the world over time as history’s most brutal bombing campaign irrespective of the reality.

Better to drop no bombs on the North then what Johnson did.

A conventional military campaign not deep in North Vietnam, but deep enough to force them to commit their resources to a conventional war our generals knew how to deal with was the best option at the time for forcing the North to the table to accept a reasonable peace.

The last option was to learn how to do a counterinsurgency campaign. It was totally alien to our generals at the time. They didn’t understand 101 about COIN. But, if you did find a US general who did know, was given a free hand and was charismatic and aggressive enough who you made Supreme Commander in theater this would be a zero risk of wider war option that Johnson was looking for.

The problem is you had no such obvious figure in the top ranks of the US Army coming out of WW2 and Korea. The second problem is Johnson really did want to personally micromanage the war the way he micromanaged politics in DC and that was never going to work under any military plan.
 
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Ian_W

Banned
A conventional military campaign not deep in North Vietnam, but deep enough to force them to commit their resources to a conventional war our generals knew how to deal with was the best option at the time for forcing the North to the table to accept a reasonable peace.

The last option was to learn how to do a counterinsurgency campaign. It was totally alien to our generals at the time. They didn’t understand 101 about COIN. But, if you did find a US general who did know, was given a free hand and was charismatic and aggressive enough who you made Supreme Commander in theater this would be a zero risk of wider war option that Johnson was looking for.

Can you see the paradox in these two things ?

Any conventional campaign is going to pull the glory away from COIN, which the US Army didnt want to do, and did not do well.

It doesn't matter if this conventional campaign in chasing LAVN in the mountains, rice paddies or swamps of North Vietnam, or the mountains, rice paddies or swamps of South Vietnam - the US Army will see any effort whatsoever to COIN as pulling resources away from the option that will "force the North to the table to accept a reasonable peace".

And, of course, that campaign will continually be forced deeper and deeper into North Vietnam, as the North declines to accept what the US will see as a reasonable peace.
 
Can you see the paradox in these two things ?

Any conventional campaign is going to pull the glory away from COIN, which the US Army didnt want to do, and did not do well.

I was talking about separate options for war plans not COIN and a conventional invasion.

If we did a conventional invasion a little bit into the North enough to force them to commit to it then the ARVN would be freed up to go after the tail with the reporters transfixed on the conventional fight. That means a brutal war in the South and perhaps Laos while the conventional campaign is going on not COIN. A conventional campaign would have to have very well agreed to lines between DC and the Commander for how far in the Army goes North.

One of the questions that from time to time comes up here is why didn’t the South take the gloves off with the insurgents the way South Korea did? The answer is fairly obvious given the unfettered press access and how even military actions that would be considered on the nicer end of what the North Vietnamese military would do were held up as examples of the evil of South Vietnam by the US media.

COIN is a totally separate option. It’s not that the Army didn’t know how to do COIN well, it didn’t know how to do it at all as an organization. Some aspects of the Marines carried on the institutional knowledge and when they practiced it found success, the Army had almost no institutional knowledge of how to conduct such a war. The COIN option means focusing American military knowledge on learning a form of war America hadn’t done in over a half century.
 
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Ian_W

Banned
If we did a conventional invasion a little bit into the North enough to force them to commit to it then the ARVN would be freed up to go after the tail with the reporters transfixed on the conventional fight. That means a brutal war in the South and perhaps Laos while the conventional campaign is going on not COIN. A conventional campaign would have to have very well agreed to lines between DC and the Commander for how far in the Army goes North..

OK, so a raid across the DMZ.

Which will fail, and will cause a call to do another, deeper one because that's the logic of escalation.

At what date are you proposing the US rips up the Geneva Accords to do this ?

And what do you propose the US does if the Soviets move a token tripwire of Soviet troops up to the frontier once they leave ?
 
The argument that anything we do leads to escalation so do nothing but token bombings of the North and add troops to the South with no strategy for victory was what caused defeat.

No there is not a certain path of escalation. Seeing the war entirely through the prism of how the US screwed up in Korea doesn’t help matters given the U.S. could have had clear lines in Korea to stop just north of Pyongyang and won even with America’s dilapidated armed forces. Even if China threw in the allied forces would have been in a position given the terrain and better supply lines to repulse them decisively.

The problem with Korea was Washington and the military didn’t have a fixed policy here is where to stop no further. Instead they had a policy of let’s keep it loose and see what happens. That would be a policy for an invasion of North Vietnam that would have led to disaster as well. You need extremely clear lines of how far to go and no farther with this option.
 
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Ian_W

Banned
The argument that anything we do leads to escalation so do nothing but token bombings of the North and add troops to the South with no strategy for victory was what caused defeat.

No there is not a certain path of escalation. Seeing the war entirely through the prism of how the US screwed up in Korea doesn’t help matters given the U.S. could have had clear lines in Korea to stop just north of Pyongyang and won even with America’s dilapidated armed forces. Even if China threw in the allied forces would have been in a position given the terrain and better supply lines to repulse them decisively.

The problem with Korea was Washington and the military didn’t have a fixed policy here is where to stop no further. Instead they had a policy of let’s keep it loose and see what happens. That would be a policy for an invasion of North Vietnam that would have led to disaster as well. You need extremely clear lines of how far to go and no farther with this option.

No, what caused defeat is that the South Vietnamese and then US Army failed to beat the LAVN in the field, which meant the LAVN could protect the parallel state they'd set up to replace the ARVN in their controlled areas.

But, please suggest when the US does the proposed invasion across the DMZ, and what lines they go to.

I'd suggest if they are anything short of Hanoi, it won't do much to convince the Hawks that the South policy is the correct one, and if they bleed the Americans enough they will go home, just like the French.
 
No, what caused defeat is that the South Vietnamese and then US Army failed to beat the LAVN in the field, which meant the LAVN could protect the parallel state they'd set up to replace the ARVN in their controlled areas.

But, please suggest when the US does the proposed invasion across the DMZ, and what lines they go to.

I'd suggest if they are anything short of Hanoi, it won't do much to convince the Hawks that the South policy is the correct one, and if they bleed the Americans enough they will go home, just like the French.

You misunderstand forcing the North to commit to a conventional military posture itself would be the victory in this scenario. The secret of the success of Linebacker 1.0 and Mao relenting on UN forces staying in South Korea is the Air Force in that era was very good at targeting conventional forces and the logistical nodes that supply them. For the Air Force targeting insurgents and insurgent supply lines? They were horrible at it in the dumb bomb era.

I really don’t have any more to say with you about the scenario as you don’t think it’s viable and I will respect your opinion, but I don’t share it.
 

Ian_W

Banned
You misunderstand forcing the North to commit to a conventional military posture itself would be the victory in this scenario. The secret of the success of Linebacker 1.0 and Mao relenting on UN forces in Korea is the Air Force in that era was rather good at targeting conventional forces and the nodes that supply them.

I really don’t have any more to say with you about the scenario as you don’t think it’s viable and I will respect your opinion, but I don’t share it.

Oh, I absolutely think it's viable - the US Army can definitely punch a division or three up through the DMZ and into North Vietnam.

I also think the main result if it was done will be someone complaining on the internet fifty years later that the US would definitely have won Vietnam except for the cowardly and halfhearted decision, probably led by Johnson micro-managing, to stop the invasion of the North at the completely artificial line of wherever you think they should stop.
 
Oh, I absolutely think it's viable - the US Army can definitely punch a division or three up through the DMZ and into North Vietnam.

I also think the main result if it was done will be someone complaining on the internet fifty years later that the US would definitely have won Vietnam except for the cowardly and halfhearted decision, probably led by Johnson micro-managing, to stop the invasion of the North at the completely artificial line of wherever you think they should stop.
The problem is not to invade the North and capture Hanoi. It's not even to hold Hanoi for a while, both can be done. Both were done by France after WWII. The problem is that you will not be able to force a conventional war on North Vietnam. You couldn't then, you couldn't now and the Chinese couldn't in 1406 either. The US is not the first one to think of this plan, and it worked out for litterally no one in the last 1500 years.

If you invade, the army will go into the mountains and jungles, resupply and create insurgencies that force you to spend money and forces on securing the whole territory. The more you repress, the more partisans you'll have and the invasion itself will be seen as proof of the necessity of the movement.

When the French conquered Indochina the first time, they set up Tonkin as a protectorate, meaning the administration was still done by the Court and the Mandarins. Despite this, despite not uprooting everything, they still had to fight "piracy" for about 15 years, as well as regular uprising.
 
The enormous difference is every enemy who attempted conventional invasions of Vietnam did it in the end with the goal to conquer and occupy not to relieve pressure on one half of the country to clean house.
 
The chance of carrying out stealth genocide is somewhere between zero and zilch.
I’m just saying that you’d have plausible deniability. and with Western journalists not being able to access the North, you aren’t trying to hide the fact you’re blockading them into submission, you just don’t want to have pictures of Vietnamese children on the nightly news or in the NYT.

Soviet aid continued to go through China to Vietnam during Sino-Soviet spilt. In fact, both countries stepped up aid leve in order to out bid the other side.

Why would the North Vietnam hate Chinese forces when the US troops is at their door?
Because in the modern day, Vietnamese people like the US and American culture, but they still hate China. If you give amnesty to the North Vietnamese leaders I doubt they would rather become Chinese puppets than flee to the Soviet Union or Cuba.

And risk hitting Soviet ships?
The Soviets aren’t going to start a war over a ship being destroyed in a war zone.
 
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