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Search and Destroy, more a gestalt than a tactic, brought up alive and steaming from the command psyche. Not just a walk and a fire-fight, in action it should have been named the other way around, pick through the pieces and see if you could work together a count, the sponsor wasn't buying any dead civilians. The VC had an ostensibly similar tactic called Find and Kill. Either way, it was us looking for him looking for us looking for him, war on a Cracker Jack box, repeated to diminishing returns. Michael Herr, Dispatches

Was there an alternative to the tactic of search and destroy, and an alternative to the strategy of attrition that The United States could have deployed that would have resulted in the preservation of South Vietnam, I.e. 'victory'?

One alternative strategy comes from David R. Palmer who argued in Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective (1995) that The United States should have extended a continuous defense line along the 17th parallel from the China Sea to Thailand (ignoring Laotian supposed 'neutrality') and then fought a completely defensive war, thus (I assume) forcing Hanoi to seek to infiltrate its troops and supplies south through the territory of a better organized and more successful anti-communist Thailand (instead of Laos and Cambodia).

Does anyone believe this or any other alternative strategy could have resulted in an American victory in Vietnam?

P.S. Palmer recognized that search and destroy missions would still have had to be deployed against the Vietcong (NLF) in the south but would have been successful without Hanoi's support.
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