An Unanswered Question Today

[H2O Man]

40. My niece's husband

commented to the guy arguing with me:

1. All wars are, at bottom, "political". The principle of ultimate civilian control of the military is tacit acknowledgment of that fact (which, for example, is why Truman famously fired MacArthur for insubordination during the Korean War). The alternative is the ascension of a military caste with all that implies for destruction of civil society.
2. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese/NLF clearly had a home-court advantage over the US forces with their 6000-mile supply lines. The North Vietnamese unfailingly referred to the Diem/Ky/Thieu governments as "puppet regimes", and so they turned out to be as ARVN was overwhelmed by the North's forces in a little over two years after the departure of the Americans.
3. The placement of "communist" North Vietnam under the USSR's nuclear umbrella proved to be decisive constraint upon the freedom of action of the US military. Although at least one ultra-militarist US General (Curtis LeMay, who later served as the arch-segregationist George Wallace's running mate in his 1968 presidential run) strongly advocated nuking North Vietnam, under the circumstances, LBJ understood that as a bridge too far.
4. Successive US governments, intoxicated as they were by their own Cold War rhetoric, contextualized the Vietnam War as a necessary component of a global war on Communism, but failed to understand that the forces arrayed against them in Southeast Asia had succeeded in melding their anti-capitalism to a fight for national liberation. The combination proved to be unbeatable.
5. To further complicate an untenable situation, the US military of that era was fraught with racial tension reflective of the turmoil in the broader US society.
6. The war-weariness of broad swaths of the American public, conditioned as it was by an apparently endless engagement (what we now call a "forever war&quot by an army of reluctant conscripts, was accompanied by a growing unwillingness to fight by those very conscripts. By 1971-72, thousands of American soldiers were returning stateside addicted to hard drugs, and in extreme cases infantrymen and NCOs were killing ("fragging&quot their lieutenants, rather than risking their lives battling the NLF insurgents.
7. All told, a land war in Asia, the Vietnam War, proved to be an unwinnable quagmire as understood by a few analysts fairly early on (the early '60's) and by an increasing number of Americans as the years wore on.