"Westmoreland Had the Right Idea On Winning the Vietnam War" Topic

"Three years ago, the United States gave up its defense of freedom and constitutional democracy for the people of Afghanistan. Forty-nine years ago, the American defense of the South Vietnamese people ended in defeat.

What is wrong with us that we can't win "small wars"?

The Antiwar movement preached that we could never win in Vietnam and so shouted loudly that we should get out of Vietnam "NOW!", chanting "Hey, hey LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?" and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!"

And yes, American generals and war planners struggled to find a formula for victory in Vietnam. On the one hand, Secretary of Defense McNamara believed that if the U.S. fought a "war of big battalions", we could attrit invading North Vietnamese army units and so drive Hanoi to cease its aggression. On the other hand, a different strategy was needed to contest control of South Vietnam's 2,000 rural villages. That effort was called "the Other War" and was mostly assigned to South Vietnamese nationalist forces in villages and districts. By 1967 neither defensive effort seemed to be working well…."

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Armand

… the American defense of the South Vietnamese people ended in defeat.

We were defending the PEOPLE? Really?
No. We were propping up a corrupt regime that claimed to be anti-Communist.

Glup!…

Armand

The idea that if we kill enough, then the communists would run out of troops, was false. The population density maps of the era showed Vietnam as one of the most populated areas in the world.

I never felt that the USA lost the war. With Vietnamization, where every CONUS and NG unit lost their equipment , gave the South Vietnam more enough AFV and ammo to win. Corruption lost the war.

The corruption was rampant ! Being with CAG, we had to deal with it all the time :/