Khe Sanh had the Co Roc caves right across the border in Laos shelling it, they would shoot then pull back into caves. Firebase Ripcord had an adjacent Hill 1000 that was only about a click away but had reinforced bunkers from which they lobbed mortars and such into Ripcord. The war is replete with stories of the NVA “digging in” and being damn near impossible to dislodge.
Yeah, I know our long-term strategy sucked but I’m talking on the battlefield level. If grunts had the ability to GPS a bunker system pinning them down and a couple Hellfires or JADMs hit spot on it would certainly have helped the ground situation day to day.
Yes, the jungle helped hide bad guys much better than the mountains of Afghanistan or the somewhat open areas of Ukraine. Even the advent of more powerful man-portable weapons like the Javelin or “Goose” would be quite efficient in a battle to take on entrenched enemies (like the Japanese in WWII also). Of course humping those same weapons through a triple canopy rainforest is another factor altogether! I was stationed in an Infantry unit in Panama in the mid-80’s and while I was in BN Mortars the line companies were still issued the 90mm recoilless rifle (looked like a larger caliber bazooka). I recall dudes bitching about humping that beast through the jungla; it caught on everything as you picked your way through.
Yes, that is likely correct. We train shitty, unmotivated armies. The only exception to that (at least in the last 70 years) would be South Korea…the ROKs are tough as nails.
I’d just say that the NVA couldn’t take the place over until we were gone; same with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It took us being out of the picture before the adversary could assume power. I certainly don’t classify that as a “win” by a long shot, but it doesn’t fit “defeat” in the classical sense either.
Think about it: a patrol gets ambushed out in the hinterlands today and if they can lase or GPS a target—and there are aircraft or drones in the area—the enemy is gonna eat some well-placed munitions. That tech wasn’t available 50 years ago. Just hypothetically spit-balling for the sake of discussion in this thread. Obviously you can’t roll back time.
Worth noting a couple big differences: 1. the ROK’s were well motivated and 2. they were trained 1-on-1 with each American soldier having a Korean “battle buddy” who it was his job to train and they both knew that both their lives depended on each covering the other’s back and sharing everything they knew.
If Americans had had 2022 weaponry in Vietnam, we would have won the battlefield even harder than we did, but still lose the political and diplomatic efforts.
If the NVA/VC had also had 2022 weaponry, the US would still have won the battlefield despite higher losses, but still have lost the political and diplomatic efforts.
“We” (the US) define winning and losing differently than a lot of other countries, especially countries in the east and mid-east. The Viet Minh/Viet Cong/NVA played the long game brilliantly.
I also think that part of the issue with the South Vietnamese being a shitty military is it’s hard to have the will to fight when the military is infiltrated and your family is at risk of assassination because of your military affiliation. The SV military have plenty of ‘heroes’ to said ‘eff that’ and were brilliant and tenacious. The SV military was also had a lot of apathy. Hard to to win a war for the host nation when a lot of them don’t want to participate.
We praise the Ukranians for fighting the Russian invasion, YET we are being invaded
by millions of foreign nationals and it is hardly mentioned, Death to the Democrats !
We didn’t invade the north and we didn’t flatten Hanoi and Haiphong among other things. How long would have Germany lasted if we never invaded or flatten their country. All the more modern equipment in the world isn’t going to make a difference if you don’t take the fight to their door steps. On top of that, we just got tired of fighting. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Japan gearing up to defend the homeland and we were going to invade, but then we nuked them. Equipment is of course very important, but it’s not everything against a very very determined enemy.
To be fair to myself regarding the “political will” statements (which I agree we still don’t have) I did say “battlefield outcome”, not strategic. Like the infantry platoon or company fighting for their lives…IMHO precision munitions would have helped. Afghanistan’s terrain was rough (I’ve heard it described as “Vietnam without the jungle”) and from numerous accounts precision munitions helped out tactically; this of course assumes those munitions were available for pretty-damn-quick delivery if things were dicey.
The overall outcome I don’t think would have changed due to the political spinelessness previously mentioned, but I wonder if our casualties would have been far less than 58,000.
