Vietnam War: Battlefield of the Future

MacCaulay

Banned
As far as crazy weapons go, the one that I always wish got more love and fame was the Ontos. Who DOESN'T love a tank with six recoilless rifles strapped onto the turret?

Just looking at it, it honestly doesn't even look real:

Ontos.jpg
 
Interestingly nobody's pointing out objects that would have significantly helped the PAVN, PLAF or local force militias. Let alone the people of Cambodia and Laos.

Often I've heard that this is the case due to the sheer excellence of the PAVN/PLAF strategy. But wait, Tet-1 '68 was a cluster fuck so bad that they had to get Giap back into leadership to unfuck the general line.

Let us assume that while the "General Uprising" element of any offensives will not be properly executed (Tet-1 was viewed as premature by people favouring the "General Uprising" component of the line), that the "General Offensive" line will continue to be dominant. The general offensive line requires periods of strength building followed by punctuated heavy offensives designed to achieve strategic outcomes. (We could develop this further as a change in strategy for Tet-1 aimed at take, destroy, retreat in good order, but this lies in the field of strategy not weaponry).

So what could we do with technology that would significantly change the balance of forces?

Man portable anti-tank, anti-aircraft and heavy shaped charge remote triggered mines. These are obviously not useful for the General Offensive per say, but allow for a higher capacity for force preservation.

In terms of 1972, better integral air defence for armoured units would be a key finding.

I'm not overly familiar with the structure of PAVN air forces; was there a similarly affordable Soviet / Chinese bloc interceptor with superior performance available?

yours,
Sam R.
 
Yeah, what about NV forces with cool new stuff? North Vietnam needs air defense. Could a dazzle laser have been mounted on the ground or in an airplane to temporarily blind (and maybe cause enough blind spots that a pilot would be retired) pilots? If the disability is lasting, as it likely would be, would this undermine NV cred? Would the US respond with even more use of defoliants on farms to starve NV?

And on the US side: What if we were using the latest update of the 6mm 1949 Enfield bullpup? More manuverable than the M-16 and slightly more stopping power. This would require a near-ASB POD in the early 50s as there's a huge not invented here bias is US procurement. Perhaps the UK adopts the Enfield bullpup and sells it to other countries. It proves itself in the colonial conflicts and is licensed to US production in 1959. I am a huge fan of the Enfield bullpup. Left handers could be given heavy automatics like the BAR or grenade launchers.

Laser and video gided bombs were used in Vietnam. How about more of them? Maybe the pigeon guided cruise missile and bat bomb making a comeback?
 
North Vietnam needs air defense. Could a dazzle laser have been mounted on the ground or in an airplane to temporarily blind (and maybe cause enough blind spots that a pilot would be retired) pilots? If the disability is lasting, as it likely would be, would this undermine NV cred? Would the US respond with even more use of defoliants on farms to starve NV?

If North Vietnam was killing and crippling US pilots anyway (an SA-2 is quite capable of doing that) I can't imagine there would be an increased outrage over pilots being dazzled, even if permanent eye damage resulted. I also don't think the North Vietnamese would have been able to acquire, use effectively and maintain enough lasers (able to dazzle pilots miles away) to have much of an effect on the war.

But let's ignore all that. If the US wants to increase the pressure on North Vietnam as a response to this, they don't need to defoliate the country. Haiphong harbour was a major shipment point for all sorts of military materials, but IIRC the ships there were seldom attacked. Going after them strikes me as a much more direct and effective way of impairing the ability of North Vietnam to fight.
 
Emperor Norton I;3979936 How effective would the mirror from space have been at it's job?

Very effective if in place with an advanced tracking device. From the moon (lunar revolution is every 29 days or so compared to the
Earth's 1, etc.) not so much. The Sun is a non point source, so it moves
outward at a .5 degree spread, and in a fire fight, the closer the better.

Most of the effective cost of a satellite is station keeping, in the case of
a constantly moving large one, more so. Most of the cost of the hard
equipment is not the mirror, but the mirror backing. Therefore the
question is very important. The cost is, both effective over how
long of a lifetime and the initial outlay. Lighting up the whole Vietnam,
even with a small amount of daylight intensity, seems prohibitive for
a few centuries.

Larger the array, harder it is to focus upon the source. I personally would
suggest a IR reflection only. While the absorption is much higher, the
VC would not at first know why we saw so much. Of course, they would
hide in as much cover as possible anyway.
 
There was at least some talk around this time of using miniaturized nuclear power plants to produce synthetic fuels like ammonia in-theater, to save the cost of shipping them in. The reactors were even going to be modular and mobile; they'd be mounted on enormous tractor-trailer trucks and schlepped to wherever they were needed. This never got beyond paper studies, in part because the technology just wasn't there.

On a more mundane level, the Army Nuclear Power Program wanted to send a barge-mounted nuclear reactor, the MH-1A, to Vietnam to power an army base - I believe they intended to ultimately mass produce the things and send them to wherever the Army needed electricity. Not intended for actual combat, obviously, but for supply depots and air bases and the like. The reactor itself was actually built and used in the Panama Canal Zone for about a decade, but never sent to Vietnam - the administration wanted to avoid having "Vietnam" and "nuclear" even in the same sentence. There may also have been economic issues - the ANPP's other projects mostly tended to work well enough but be too expensive to be worth the trouble.
 
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