There's a quote to the extent of "the US never lost a battle in the Vietnam, but still lost the war" which is probably what they were getting at, which just honestly proves the point that America was really optimizing for the wrong measure in that war.
I very well understand there were challenges in the war - and that 'body count' and 'battles won' was not going to be a good metric.
This is a valid point: we though it was going great because hey - look at the 'battles won' and 'body' count, but really it wasn't.
But the US did not remotely lose the war.
There is no rational basis for suggesting this - it doesn't even make sense.
This is the weird delusional pop culture response that is the problem: misquotes, lies, exaggerations, political statements - all of this about this war specifically that lends reasonable people to think something happened ... that did not happen.
It got a little ugly but the US won on fairly hard terms: South Vietnamese insurgency was wiped out, and the North Vietnamese Army was in tatters. This only after a few short years of heavy fighting, with limited engagement by the US, an something like 10-1 casualty rates favouring the Americans.
It's ironic because the Americans actually did kind of 'lose' in a way in Korea and we don't look at it the same way due to the different political nature of the war.
Subject: Program of Action to Prevent Communist Domination of South Viet Nam
The US Objective: to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam and to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society.
The US had not achieved those objectives 12 years later. The communists won control over the whole country a few years after US withdrawal finished. Vietnam's government is still communist today.
This is basically what I learned browsing through encyclopedias when I was a kid. I did a quick fact-check just now in case I had been misled or misremembered. I can sort-of understand saying that the communists didn't achieve victory over the USA either (because they also didn't manage to install an allied government in the territory of the USA), but claiming that the US won is weird.
"The US had not achieved those objectives 12 years later."
Yes. They did.
The US did achieve those objectives in the early 1970s'.
The US vanquished the South Vietnamese forces, and did considerably damage to North Vietnamese forces using air power - to the point where North Vietnamese did not have a capable fighting force.
Communism was basically gone in the South, in the North, inoperable, at least militarily.
Then the US left.
A few years later, the North built up their armies and waltzed into the South.
It's really crazy, strategically that the US withdrew - all they had to do was leave about 50K soldiers, sitting 'behind the wire' not really fighting, maybe an aircraft carrier, i.e. 'the threat of violence' and S. Vietnam would be as free today as S. Korea. The Americans withdrew because of populist political pressure back home i.e teens protesting. I don't believe the US should have necessarily gone to war in Vietnam, but after they did, they should have stayed - it would have cost very little.
Anyhow - as per the article - 'points of measure' can be misleading, as it was with 'bodycount' in Vietnam, but they're not entirely misleading.
Number of enemy combatants, civilians, allies killed or wounded is a very important metric in every conflict. It's just not 'the' metric.
If the North didn't have a capable fighting force any more, and still overwhelmed the South shortly after the US withdrew, that means the US did not actually establish a "a viable and increasingly democratic society" during the time it had a military presence there. Societal viability includes, at a minimum, being able to survive one's enemies. Enemies that were already drastically weakened during the period of US involvement, by your own account.
France today is not the same as France in 1939 - the period from 1870-1940 is generally considered the French Third Republic, and they're on the Fifth Republic now. Poland today is not the same as Poland in 1939. Germany today is certainly not the same as Germany in 1939. Not only are the people in charge different, but the whole system of government is different, the cultural values are different, and many of the cities were rebuilt from the ground up.
Just because a society collapses doesn't mean the people disappear, or even that they start to think of themselves as a different nationality. Society is all of the organizational superstructure on top of that, and barring rare cases like governments-in-exile-that-can-pick-up-where-they-left-off-when-liberated, that usually doesn't survive being defeated in warfare.
I respect your charitable interpretation, but it turns out to be overly charitable based on subsequent posts. I’m going to take a page out of the “know when to back away slowly” handbook, and back away slowly from this train wreck.
