but the question wasn't , with hindsight what should everyone else have done.
With hindsight, what should have been the US strategy in Vietnam?
- Thread starter Gukpard
- Start date
- Vietnamization from the beginning.
- Hundreds of thousands of ground forces from the beginning.
- Expand the conflict to Laos and Cambodia from the beginning to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
- Massive aeriel bombing and harbor mining from the beginning.
- Control the Media in a much more strict manner.
- Send all draftees to Europe and all volunteers to Vietnam to improve morale and commitment to the war.
- Make the Strategic Hamlet Program voluntary and provide economic incentives to buy loyalty of farmers.
- Don't persecute Buddhists.
- Prevent South Vietnamese military coups.
- Subsidize American made products and import them into South Vietnam at dirt cheap prices to create a cultural connection and loyalty to capitalism.
Doing all of this from the very beginning pretty much means by the time 1968 comes around, the Viet Cong is already wiped out, the Tet Offensive can't happen, the US public remains loyal, and the South Vietnamese military is years ahead in training. At that point say mission accomplished, withdrawal ground forces, but keep the air and naval campaign going until North Vietnam submits.
The US lost not because it couldn't win, but because it went in without a plan and one hand tied behind it's back, and by the time they tried to take the war seriously, they already had lost the support of the American republic.
- Hundreds of thousands of ground forces from the beginning.
- Expand the conflict to Laos and Cambodia from the beginning to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
- Massive aeriel bombing and harbor mining from the beginning.
- Control the Media in a much more strict manner.
- Send all draftees to Europe and all volunteers to Vietnam to improve morale and commitment to the war.
- Make the Strategic Hamlet Program voluntary and provide economic incentives to buy loyalty of farmers.
- Don't persecute Buddhists.
- Prevent South Vietnamese military coups.
- Subsidize American made products and import them into South Vietnam at dirt cheap prices to create a cultural connection and loyalty to capitalism.
Doing all of this from the very beginning pretty much means by the time 1968 comes around, the Viet Cong is already wiped out, the Tet Offensive can't happen, the US public remains loyal, and the South Vietnamese military is years ahead in training. At that point say mission accomplished, withdrawal ground forces, but keep the air and naval campaign going until North Vietnam submits.
The US lost not because it couldn't win, but because it went in without a plan and one hand tied behind it's back, and by the time they tried to take the war seriously, they already had lost the support of the American republic.
Australia was concerned with maintaining US interest in Australia and had to make strong representations to be allowed to join the enterprise.
Most people involved had much more local horizons around land distribution, the post-French rural proletarian rice economy, and Catholic landlordism. Strangely the VWP's NFL played to that table.
The ARVN had concentrated on counter insurgency to 1964. The RVN was in 1964 liable to the PLAF moving directly into general offensive without needing assistance from northern units from the PAVN. The RVN had fucked up to the point where it was demonstrated to be a failure at maintaining its capacity to recruit an army to repress its own population, the kind of sin qua non of whether a government will exist.
Well no, no it couldn't if the PLAF are wiped out in 1968 given that the first phase of Tet was reliant on PLAF manoeuvre units. The problem is your suggestions won't achieve that due to the ARVN's institutional failures. Also persecuting Buddhists is why the RVN state exists: to maintain a Catholicised land owning elite in order to structure rice exports based on French colonial needs. Attempting to radically transform the RVN state from an external position while it is in crisis will delegitimise it with its supporters without producing a new base of supporters.
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This thread is incredibly disappointing given the years people have put into understanding the RVN for what it actually was here and for understanding the NFL/PLAF and its relationships with the rest of the VWP and PAVN for what they were. The central fallacy of this thread is the idea of US agency in relation to socio-economic formations built out of the French restructuring of the Vietnamese economy and society to produce a rice-export rural proletariat. "Don't worry about Detroit, just free up the export rules and Google will solve the 1969 economic issues in the Mid West." Sure.
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The Best solution for the US in relation to this thread is, around 1964, is to treat a withdrawal from Vietnam as an exercise in pour encourager les autres. Thailand would certainly pay attention to that message.
yours,
Sam R.
Well thanks for completely agnoring the first part of my post were the us provides the shield, but then again you also don't seem to realize that the PLAF was nerly destroyed in 60 and only got to that point in 64 after the vetnam government collapsed due to the assassination of diem. Also the idea that ARVN was istitutionaly biult to keep down the budiest is hilarious (if nothing else the vast majority of the solders and officers were budist, most discrimination happened with the police) if it had been then it might have been a more effective fighting force sense as is, its only institution was makeing its generals richer.
So the issue is land reform (and making sure any party elected on such a platform would follow through. Not sure where wholesale democratization contraindicates this (although a lot of Cold Warriors made that mistake).
There's a name for products that provide internal shields. It'd be hard to "destroy" in 1960 that which was worried about political coherence in 1958. The PLAF was the result of a larger, earlier, political crisis. It didn't prove to have issues reconstituting itself after 1968 as a political force.
Democracy would mean a destabilisation of stitched together elite graft networks. Land reform would have to be pitched really tightly to benefit labourers at the same time as it benefits landlords. And you'd have to compare it against the NFL's concrete examples of land redistribution in controlled areas, which regardless of the eventual policies of the VWP were what was on advertisement in the south, by southern activists.
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That is my point. Those graft networks and ruling elites are what dragged the RVN down in OTL and sidelining them along with encouraging a government in Saigon that benefits the peasantry (even if it means the NFL being brought in as a coalition partner) makes it vastly easier to sell unification with the One Party State in Hanoi as a bad idea.
The comparison I'd put to an American is in the void of the Machines, the crude mechanics have the best remaining machine. You get rid of the Diem graft network and you end up with less efficient graft networks historically. The people who didn't want to be part of a graft network wanted a rational technocracy and organised with the NFL/VWP. There's an absent middle.
If you can find an example of a non-"Machine" politics in the region in the 1960s go for it. I can't . I can only find more efficient "Machines" like the LDP (Japan).
If you can find an example of a non-"Machine" politics in the region in the 1960s go for it. I can't . I can only find more efficient "Machines" like the LDP (Japan).
This how Americans perceived the war - "It's all the Soviet's fault!" In reality it was the North's fault, as such. They wanted a united, independent Vietnam, where external interference was minimised as much as possible. The Soviet's employment was as a supplier - a supplier who's employment was at a minimum. The Soviet's Ambassador for most of the war wrote a memoir after the fall of Communism in Russia. There he outline what happened, basically he was kept cooling his heels outside the Politburo meetings in Hanoi and then he was summoned in and they presented their demands for the next few months' of supplies to him. Compare that to how the US managed the war in the South, they had a complete shadow government in action, dictating to the South's own Government how it was meant to be acting and what it was doing.
I don't know what the US should have done; however, I do know one thing which they should not have done: body counting.
If I remember correctly the policy to judge officers based on the casualties they caused led to such things as soldiers killing innocent civilians in order to receive promotion; the result being that body counting led to there being more rebels instead of less rebels.
If I remember correctly the policy to judge officers based on the casualties they caused led to such things as soldiers killing innocent civilians in order to receive promotion; the result being that body counting led to there being more rebels instead of less rebels.
The same plaf that did exist after tet? Mostly made up of northern solders and what was left after most deid in tet, and if any servide to the end of the war often ended up in reduction camps anyway because they had no political power after tet, and not much before. Don't know what your implying for the first sentence but if your going to debate speak clearly, especially if your going to keep moveing goal posts, the plaf had moved past that by the end of 1958 let alone 60.
Land to the Tiller
Bring back the VNQDD. What happened to those guys anyway
Land reform in South Vietnam succeeds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_South_Vietnam In 1954, South Vietnam's ally, the United States, advised the new government of South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, to undertake "indispensable reforms" including land reform. In response on 8 January 1955, Diem adopted Ordinance...
www.alternatehistory.com
Bring back the VNQDD. What happened to those guys anyway
Too reliant on the Chinese Nationalists for support, which is dysfunctional in itself, and progressively routed by the French, Viet Minh and Diem. There was simply no one who could provide the kind of unifying leadership that Ho Chi Minh gave to the Viet Minh.
I have to agree. I find it telling that my post, which recommends actually paying attention to the wishes of the Vietnamese people recommends the US basically hijack the Communists revolution to eventually overthrow and install a genuinely democratic regime in the south while making sure it's actual military operations are appropriately limited and focused, is followed up by a posts which largely ignores what hindsight actually tells us about the nature of the Vietnamese conflict in favor of trying to double down on the worst aspects of American military operations in Vietnam as if they are politically or militarily feasible while basically praying the other side has no actual say in the matter, in several cases flirting with actual nuclear annihilation if they get the certain elements of "other sides" reaction wrong.
At least I can take comfort in the fact my post has gotten around 10 likes, whereas those others are ignored. So people here at least can recognize bad takes.
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just go nuculer as if taking over some godless jungles are worth victory at all costs may just jump to ww3 off the bat
I always think that the primary issue of these threads is that it takes an American lens to a uniquely Vietnamese situation. The first step would be to identify and understand the legitimate grievances that the Viet Minh and, later the Viet Cong were able to exploit within Vietnamese society to create dissatisfaction towards the South Vietnamese government. A key issue that needs to be addressed is that of land reform, which is particularly difficult given that the South Vietnamese elite usually also controlled large swathes of the countryside and, when land reform was eventually embraced it was far more conservative in nature compared to either Taiwan, South Korea or even Japan that were aggressive. I think American funding could help to smooth the wheels of the land transfer, establishment of title and provision of farming support / machinery etc.
Any South Vietnamese government must at face value be seen as more inclusive and by that I mean not exclusively composed of a majority of Roman Catholics. Rather Buddhists must constitute a plurality of the cabinet or, if the President is Catholic then the Prime Minister should be a Buddhist. Personally, I would have kept the monarchy as it could have provided a rival symbol to the North and a link to Vietnamese history.
There are a few other ideas, but to start with I would focus upon the social issues and then understand how IMHO the security problems are a flow on impact from the former.
Any South Vietnamese government must at face value be seen as more inclusive and by that I mean not exclusively composed of a majority of Roman Catholics. Rather Buddhists must constitute a plurality of the cabinet or, if the President is Catholic then the Prime Minister should be a Buddhist. Personally, I would have kept the monarchy as it could have provided a rival symbol to the North and a link to Vietnamese history.
There are a few other ideas, but to start with I would focus upon the social issues and then understand how IMHO the security problems are a flow on impact from the former.
The important things have been said. South Vietnam was not a state in '67, show elections notwithstanding. '67 was the last year it looked like the Allies were winning. Then Tet happened and broke the back of our will, even though not our combat ability.
If that one British force hadn't raced to eject Ho and end Vietnamese independence, then Vietnam would have been, de facto, a country, and America might have recognized it, even though it was very low on the 1945 priorities table. That would have been ideal. A southeast Yugoslavia sounds awesome.
If that one British force hadn't raced to eject Ho and end Vietnamese independence, then Vietnam would have been, de facto, a country, and America might have recognized it, even though it was very low on the 1945 priorities table. That would have been ideal. A southeast Yugoslavia sounds awesome.
There is a reason I keep beating the Broad-Based Democracy drum when it comes to preserving a separate South Viet-Nam. If the Viet Minh were holding the majority of seats in the Saigon Quoc-Hoi how much armed assisstance would they be seeking from Hanoi?