My dad told me that the reason we (The US) lost Vietnam was because we didn't escalate the war enough. I want to know what would've happened if we would've escalated Vietnam.
WI: An escalated Vietnam War
- Thread starter TwiliAlchemist
- Start date
TFSmith121
Banned
At the height, the US committed 500,000 troops to Vietnam,
At the height, the US committed 500,000 troops to Vietnam, an expeditionary force that was only surpassed by the WW I and WW II mobilizations in the Twentieth Century.
Absent full mobilization, activation of all reserve and Guard units, and invading North Vietnam (which would have led to Chinese intervention), the correlation of forces was such that the North Vietnamese were always going to outlast the US and its South Vietnamese allies.
Vietnam was a strategic mistake of the highest order; as rational thinkers had said as early as early as 1964-65 (James Gavin and David Shoup, for example) were saying, there was nothing in SEA worth the life or limb of an American.
Best,
At the height, the US committed 500,000 troops to Vietnam, an expeditionary force that was only surpassed by the WW I and WW II mobilizations in the Twentieth Century.
Absent full mobilization, activation of all reserve and Guard units, and invading North Vietnam (which would have led to Chinese intervention), the correlation of forces was such that the North Vietnamese were always going to outlast the US and its South Vietnamese allies.
Vietnam was a strategic mistake of the highest order; as rational thinkers had said as early as early as 1964-65 (James Gavin and David Shoup, for example) were saying, there was nothing in SEA worth the life or limb of an American.
Best,
I have seen two proposals on how the war could of been 'won' based on our level of commitment.
The book "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War' (Harry Summers, came out in 1995 (excellent read by the way) proposes that the US Army should have invaded Laos and extended the DMZ (17th Parallel) to the Thai border through Laos, while closing down the Cambodian ports which would have shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail and thus starved the NVA and VC forces of replacements, ammunition and weapons.
I have seen a couple of proposals where invading North Vietnam through an airborne/amphibious invasion through Haiphong would have worked, as the overwhelming majority of the NVA was in South Vietnam and thus it was wide open.
Both seem possible to me, in that they used forces in theater with out much reinforcement, and play to American strengths and push on NVA weaknesses. Neither would have been popular, but then nothing really was at the 1970 period or later, so political costs wouldn't have been much different.
Another way to go would have been to concentrate on the pacification war with regional and local forces backed by US advisors, while the ARVN defended the border with US advisors and limited combat units. The Regional forces were actually pretty good at pacification, and after Tet they won their war. South Vietnam ultimately fell to a mechanized combined arms invasion army, not from the Viet Cong
LBJ was the wrong President for that war. Nixon would have acted more decisively sooner in 1964, but then Nixon wasn't an option in 1964.
The book "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War' (Harry Summers, came out in 1995 (excellent read by the way) proposes that the US Army should have invaded Laos and extended the DMZ (17th Parallel) to the Thai border through Laos, while closing down the Cambodian ports which would have shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail and thus starved the NVA and VC forces of replacements, ammunition and weapons.
I have seen a couple of proposals where invading North Vietnam through an airborne/amphibious invasion through Haiphong would have worked, as the overwhelming majority of the NVA was in South Vietnam and thus it was wide open.
Both seem possible to me, in that they used forces in theater with out much reinforcement, and play to American strengths and push on NVA weaknesses. Neither would have been popular, but then nothing really was at the 1970 period or later, so political costs wouldn't have been much different.
Another way to go would have been to concentrate on the pacification war with regional and local forces backed by US advisors, while the ARVN defended the border with US advisors and limited combat units. The Regional forces were actually pretty good at pacification, and after Tet they won their war. South Vietnam ultimately fell to a mechanized combined arms invasion army, not from the Viet Cong
LBJ was the wrong President for that war. Nixon would have acted more decisively sooner in 1964, but then Nixon wasn't an option in 1964.
I agree. Even though Nixon would go on to end the war, he understood the U.S. had to escalate the war before going through with its exiting plan.
my assumption when I hear that is that whatever was necessary to win... and I have heard nukes bandied about as the 'solution'. (Obviously they were not of course)
Ditch the RVN, force elections, side with the NFL/PRG and DRVN, neutralise them through an Asian Marshall Aid schema. Threaten your incompetent clients with replacement on the RVN model.
or, Expand beyond 500,000 which means a general mobilisation beyond Korean levels by far. Wear the strikes and mutinies and assassinations of Representatives, Senators, Generals and Bankers ala the West German Berlin Thing on steroids. Keep the Vietnam Emergency suspension of habeas corpus going until sometime in the mid 1980s when the RVN is sufficiently a basket case that three kinds of non-US citizens exist in the RVN: ARVN, whores and the dead.
or, go nuclear and declare that the Emergency Government of the United States won the war to the survivors in the Voluntary Agricultural Resettlement Regions.
or, use a dolchstoßelegende to declare that you actually did win, but those damn ARVN lost when Congress failed Boeing Aerospace, and declare your actual win conditions to be the preservation of the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia from "communism."
The United States has nowhere to expand to. Their wad was well shot.
yours,
Sam R.
Not advertising, but I have this in my Tales of the Shining Pearl TL. See my signature 
In my TL, much greater involvement of allied East and Southeast Asian states (esp. Philippines, Thailand, Japan, etc. because it supports economic growth rater dictatorships in my TL), Ngo Dinh Diem crushing the coup, forced to reform the military and economy, and more commitment (due to JFK being much more hawkish, esp. after in my TL Indonesia goes Red and no Sino-Soviet split with a Red Scare), and entering Cambodia (or rather invading it) with Norodom Sihanouk's pleading, and then the Lao King's pleading in 1968.
In my TL, much greater involvement of allied East and Southeast Asian states (esp. Philippines, Thailand, Japan, etc. because it supports economic growth rater dictatorships in my TL), Ngo Dinh Diem crushing the coup, forced to reform the military and economy, and more commitment (due to JFK being much more hawkish, esp. after in my TL Indonesia goes Red and no Sino-Soviet split with a Red Scare), and entering Cambodia (or rather invading it) with Norodom Sihanouk's pleading, and then the Lao King's pleading in 1968.
The US did escalate it. It lost Vietnam because it was too bloody and anything else is a lie.
If you mean "anything to win", fucked-up shit will happen. In a democracy, decisions are bound by public will. If a regime is ignorant of that, they will be defeated. If Nixon does this, the Democrats will protest against this, or anti-war representatives will win seats
The problem with escalation is that the U.S seemed unsure of how to handle it other than stay the present course and hope it plays out.
The U.S knew about the Sino-Soviet split by then, but though if they left then the Chinese would win out in Vietnam influence wise and the Soviets be more aggressive for that loss of face. the thing is the U.S was better off with having Westmoreland replaced before Tet as planned, and having Abram's strategy of managing and defending the hamlets work better. The only problem was the strategy was effective under president Thieu, but that was post-tet when U.S support was winding down. How this work under Diem is anyone's guess.
The U.S knew about the Sino-Soviet split by then, but though if they left then the Chinese would win out in Vietnam influence wise and the Soviets be more aggressive for that loss of face. the thing is the U.S was better off with having Westmoreland replaced before Tet as planned, and having Abram's strategy of managing and defending the hamlets work better. The only problem was the strategy was effective under president Thieu, but that was post-tet when U.S support was winding down. How this work under Diem is anyone's guess.
There are people like Colin Powell who have said the US could have won Vietnam if we had done the same type of mobilization and war industry as we had done in WW2. The problem, as was always the problem in Vietnam, is what was the point? We could have fully mobilized and gone full WW2 on a third world country, but that's not the war we wanted. So what is the war we wanted? That was always the problem. And you could possibly achieve victory that way, but no one cared that much because even in their deepest hearts I think the people that supported that war had an inkling that Vietnam was not that important. In short, the value of the outcome is not worth the value of the effort. And I cannot find the valid argument in doubling down on what failed to work in the first place. That's what Vietnam already was. Send more people for a war of attrition, drop more bombs, kill more people, and that's not enough so do the same thing but more, and that's not working so do the same thing but even more, etc.
We didn't need to do that, hell we didn't need half a million troops in Vietnam to win, but we did need to not destabilize South Vietnam by killing Diem and we had to do something about Laos early. Combine those things with an air campaign in 64 more like Nixon's and there might still be a South Vietnam today.
But, in the grand scheme of U.S. geostrategic interests Vietnam was a relatively low priority. Losing there was crushing to America's faith it could do big things and its part of the reason we haven't since. But, beyond there a loss there wouldn't mean Vietcong on the streets of Brussels, Paris, San Bernardino waging war on the West.
The American political elite in the end choose to stop helping Vietnam, they made a similar decision for Iraq only a very belated realization that Washington was totally wrong about the nature of the enemy pulled us back at least for Iraq.
With Vietnam the North Vietnamese were a threat, but a local one to an ally or two in South East Asia.
Just poring more troops into South Vietnam LBJ style wasn't the solution to anything. You had to cut off the supplies to the North or do something else that utterly changes the status quo that JFK and LBJ created which was perhaps the worst political and military situation that could have been devised.
I'm gonna have to disagree with a lot of things here. Diem largely brought that on himself for basically alienating all sections of society, the U.S just signed off on a coup that was in motion. The problem was the U.S only really backed Diem after he proved himself to be more capable than they thought, believing he would have been swept up in the chaos that was South Vietnam in 54.
The thing with North Vietnam was that it wasn't this unified force resisting against all odds. The Sino-Soviet split greatly hurt North Vietnam in so many ways. on the Geopolitical level, the Soviets and Chinese competed against one another by sending aid, when the Vietnamese need manpower. Also, on that front, the Chinese had more interest in supporting the NLF(Vietcong) because of its revolutionary nature.
The Split also extended to the party itself into a pro-soviet North-first faction that wanted to build up, and the pro-Chinese South-first that wanted to conquer the south. That resulted in power struggles and divisions on how to deal with the U.S. Hell, the Chinese made sure to sabotage as much Soviet aid as possible.
Vietnam was fundamental to U.S strategic interests via the Domino Theory. Losing Vietnam could mean losing Laos Cambodia Myanmar and Thailand because communists forces have bases and supplies. In a war where proving the viability of one's ideology was important, Vietnam would have been important to contain. Admittedly, I think U.S Cold War policy was fundamentally misguided and idiotic from my own research on the topic.
The problem with trying to justify South Vietnam or even whole damn war is that at first the U.S supported the wrong guy with the wrong combat methods, yet after the Tet offensives had the right guy with the right methods, but dwindling support. Sad considering the Tet Offensive was completely foolish and ruined the NLF, to the point actual North Vietnamese troops had to fight.
Diem actually knew Laos could not stay in enemy hands and the enemy attacks ever end, forget the significant rationalizing in the press and in books after of the coup, the reason it happened was because Diem was not being a good puppet and was bucking the State Dept.
The sad part is he was right, he may have been a corrupt asshole, but he knew the region and what was needed to win the war far better then the brain trust at State.
Kennedy's deal allowing Laos to be an open zone for endless resupply of men and weapons from the North going to the South was on its own a bigger mistake then LBJ ever made IMHO.
Hell, even earlier than that - like 1961/1962 - the USAF brass was saying that the United States should figure out what it wanted to achieve in Vietnam, and what they were willing to do to achieve it. If they wanted to win, they should do it quickly and comprehensively - if they weren't willing to do that, they'd get drawn into a quagmire.
The US never did figure out what the objective was, never committed enough force at the times when it was winnable, and got well and truly entangled.
Essentially, the problem was that in the early days, the North Vietnamese were directly supporting the Viet Cong. Air strikes against North Vietnam and normal counterinsurgency in South Vietnam could have won the war quite quickly. Doing so was, however, diplomatically and politically impossible.
That era was over by about 1964. From 1964-1967 or so, the Viet Cong became gradually more self-sufficient. The war remained winnable by the US & RVN, but at increasing cost - cutting the Viet Cong off from the North wouldn't do it, they had to be defeated in the field.
By 1967, 1968 at the absolute latest, the government of South Vietnam had lost control of the country to the Viet Cong. The United States was in a similar situation to, oh, Germany in 1942 - they'd lost the war, but hadn't got the memo yet.
If you really, really want the US to win in Vietnam, let the USAF off their leash in 1961 or so. At that date, there were half a dozen targets that would leave the North incapable of supporting the insurgency in the South. Hit them, and the South can wrap it up with minimal US ground troops. As an added bonus, the continuing show of force against Communism means no perceived US weakness, so no Operation ANADYR and resultant Cuban Missile Crisis.
No, precisely the opposite. Until 1964 the VWP was trickle feeding supplies to the PLAF. The Ap Bac operation and Wilfred Burchett's writings are widely available in English. Between 1959 and 1964 the largest source of PLAF military supply was material captured from the ARVN.
No, precisely the opposite. As US attrition through operations and ARVN attrition through occupations whittled down the high quality mainline and regional manpower of the PLAF which could be organised within the NFL's networks, the PAVN was more and more forced to supply replacements and entire manoeuvre units. Then, of course, 1968 effectively wipes out any independence of action the NFL had by breaking most PLAF units in open engagements, leaving only the local force militia and women's local forces, with the NFL/PRG basically being a political operation entirely dependent upon the PAVN for manpower and military units.
yours,
Sam R.