"Ia Drang – The Battle That Convinced Ho Chi Minh " Topic

…He Could Win

"Forty-five years ago this fall, in November of 1965, a lone, understrength battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) ventured where no force—not the French, not the South Vietnamese army, not the newly arrived American combat troops—had ever gone: Deep into an enemy sanctuary in the forested jungles of a plateau in the Central Highlands where the Drang River flowed into Cambodia and, ultimately, into the Mekong River that returned to Vietnam far to the south.

What happened there, in the Ia Drang Valley, 17 miles from the nearest red-dirt road at Plei Me and 37 miles from the provincial capital of Pleiku, sounded alarm bells in the Johnson White House and the Pentagon as they tallied the American losses—a stunning butcher's bill of 234 men killed and more than 250 wounded in just four days and nights, November 14-17, in two adjacent clearings dubbed Landing Zones X-ray and Albany. Another 71 Americans had been killed in earlier, smaller skirmishes that led up to the Ia Drang battles.

To that point, some 1,100 Americans in total had died in the United States' slow-growing but ever-deepening involvement in South Vietnam, most of them by twos and threes in a war where Americans were advisers to the South Vietnamese battalions fighting Viet Cong guerrillas. Now the North Vietnamese Army had arrived off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and had made itself felt. In just over one month, 305 American dead had been added to the toll from the Ia Drang fight alone. November 1965 was the deadliest month yet for the Americans, with 545 killed…."
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Amicalement
Armand

The NVA/VC leadership knew all they had to do is keep killing Americans and they will eventually leave. Like the French before them.

Ho knew he didn't have to win … he just didn't have to lose. He had homecourt advantage, support from the PRC & USSR, and the very high birth rate of his country.

Legion-
And the curious thing is how similar his strategy was to George Washington's.
Complete with rival world power support.

Not really for Washington. He could not afford the heavy losses the same way a state owned human resource department can.

VCarter-
Agreed on the casualties. But that's why I use "similar", not
"exactly".

And the curious thing is how similar his strategy was to George Washington's.
Complete with rival world power support.

Yes, GW understood that he had the "home court" advantage and a lot of territory to use to his advantage. Some of the Colonist forces were somewhat similar to the VC/NLF. Operating in their own "back yard", could fade back into the local population, etc. E.g. Marion, Green, Morgan, etc. link Similar to what Mao and Che', etc., professed decades later.

And Ho being a admirer and studied GW saw the "logic" of that type of "revolution"/insurgency …

But yes, GW didn't have the numbers that, as Joe Galloway link said, to paraphrase, "the US was fighting a war of attrition against the birth rate of a 3d World tropical Asia country." .
I.e. North Vietnamese and VC had a lot of bodies to use and could and did take very losses high losses. While inflicting as many losses as they could on the US/SEATO. Until the US got tired of losing "blood & treasure". Even if the kill ratios were very, very high when coming up against the USA's modern massive firepower and assets.

GW didn't have that luxury. But he did know what he had to do to eventually make the Brits and their Hessian allies go home.