What are the biggest missed opportunities in warfare post WW2?

[BlackDragon98]

China was winning in the 1962 war against India.
They could have pressed their advantage and taken all of Arunachal Pradesh and forced India to renounce all claims to Aksai Chin.
Take the disputed territory and then offer India a peace treaty.

 

[Kalga]

China was winning in the 1962 war against India.
They could have pressed their advantage and taken all of Arunachal Pradesh and forced India to renounce all claims to Aksai Chin.
Take the disputed territory and then offer India a peace treaty.

They were also running out of supplies and the rest of the country was still trying to sort itself out from the failure of the great leap forward. They were in no condition to push anything more than then did OTL.

 

[Retro_Reaction]

Cut off their food supply and force them to negotiate. Kind of hard to fight a war when you're rebuilding your entire food infrastructure. In the meantime either international aid or communist help would have fed them until they could make enough themselves, but they couldn't both fight and rebuild/feed their civilians on foreign aid.

I'm unconvinced that they couldn't do both. The Chinese were willing to intervene with troops in order to provide SAM support and rebuild infrastructure (not directly fight the USA I believe though). I'm also fairly certain the USSR and PRC would be able to feed the population of North Vietnam. I could see this only affecting the post-vietnam war politics, with the Vietnamese being reliant on the Chinese to secure food until they rebuild and so there would be no Sino-Vietnamese war. The USA would also become even more of a social pariah.

I also read in "Victory at Any Cost" that when US forces moved into Laos/Cambodia and physically had troops on and attacking the Ho Chi Minh trail, General Giap was very concerned because the Americans were essentially forcing the NVA to come out into the open to fight in order to protect their supply lines. I believe it only happened once, but doing it more often could have affected the war.

 

[Simon]

Jordan not taking control of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem plus land to the west of it out to say Nes Harim in 1948. A combination of better planning, making sure a decent supply of materiel has been stockpiled, and deciding bugger the Egyptians would have improved Jordan’s position and had some interesting effects in 1967.

MacArthur not having his head up his arse during the Korean War could have seen the UN forces do a lot better. I don’t think it’s completely beyond the realms of possibility for Korea to be unified under the South or at least see the border between North and South Korea be further north than our timeline’s.