Shitty, hypothetical BS, question for the military strategery expurts of the bored...

YellowSnow

One the prominent themes of the Ken Burns Vietnam War doc, is despite all of the massive tonnage of bombs we dropped on NVA and VC across all of Indochina, air power couldn't get the job done. There was amazing clip where they interview a former USAF pilot (can't recall if he was flying F-105 or F-100's) where he describes trying to hit some target and one of his bomb lost a fin or something and accidently proceeds to hit an NVA munitions dump or something far away from where he was aiming. Sets off like 15 mins strait of explosions. He said this basically summed up the entire war in his view.

All that said, do you all believe current US air power technology (e.g., drones, precision guided munitions, stealth, etc) could have been more decisive in that type of war today? In other words if we had those types of technologies in the 60's/early 70's, could we have effectively shutdown the Ho Chi Min trail and killed enough NVA/VC to get a W? Same political consideration apply.

LebamDawg

As long as we? don't want to win a war and only want to prove a poont or contain an enemy it would not make any difference IMHO. Until such time as our gov changes its ways and wants to win a war, then it could.

Can't remember the name of the book that basically stated we? were in Vietnam only to show the commies that we? could waste as much money and lives as possible to oppose them

PurpleThrobber

Never get into a land war in Asia.

Fuck. Not that hard.

Swaye

Precision guided munitions hasn't won shit in Afghanistan. An entrenched guerrilla enemy deeply dug in with the will to fight can only be beaten in a total war scenario. Scorched earth, then salt it with boots on the ground. We don't have the political will to win wars anymore. This is a nation of pussies.

pawz

If you're fighting a defined nation-state opponent, you can win.

If you're fighting a abstract philosophy, only the bankers lending you war funds wins.


HTH

AZDuck

Swaye said:

Precision guided munitions hasn't won shit in Afghanistan. An entrenched guerrilla enemy deeply dug in with the will to fight can only be beaten in a total war scenario. Scorched earth, then salt it with boots on the ground. We don't have the political will to win wars anymore. This is a nation of pussies.

Caveat with: and keep the boots on the ground for long enough that a genuinely popular pro-US regime emerges and has the ability to govern. See, e.g. South Korea.

YellowSnow

AZDuck said:

Swaye said:

Precision guided munitions hasn't won shit in Afghanistan. An entrenched guerrilla enemy deeply dug in with the will to fight can only be beaten in a total war scenario. Scorched earth, then salt it with boots on the ground. We don't have the political will to win wars anymore. This is a nation of pussies.

Caveat with: and keep the boots on the ground for long enough that a genuinely popular pro-US regime emerges and has the ability to govern. See, e.g. South Korea.

People tend to forget that we have forced a tie in Asia before (i.e., 38th parallel) and that we did kill enough Chi-coms and N. Koreans to compel them to give up and accept said tie. In Vietnam, our goal was never to overthrow the North and reunite the country, but rather to simply preserve the régime in the South. That government sucked, of course, and corruption was off the charts, but there were still plenty of people in the South who didn't want the North to take over, or where, at least, indifferent.

Unlike Korea we never were able to kill enough NVA or VC or stop the flow of weapons and supplies coming in through Laos and Cambodia to compel the North Vietnamese/VC to give up. I think it's, at least, a chinteresting counter factual to consider how things would have turned out had in 1965- 67 we killed a shit ton more of their guys than we actually did and shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail (we were never successful in doing so).

One of the things you always here the NVA and VC veterans say in the documentary is that when fighting the Americans they had to get a close as possible so our guys couldn't call in air strikes. Would precision guided munitions have made a difference in those types of scenarios at all?

RaceBannon

Air power was not as effective n WW2 as is commonly thought today. Germany was leveled, we were basically out of targets, and the US and USSR still had to slog all the way to Berlin to get the fucks to surrender

That is why Japan got two A bombs, they didn't surrender after the first one. The price to go to Tokyo would have been horrific for both sides

I think there is a lot to be said about the US not trying to win the war but that doesn't mean we? would have even if we did try

YellowSnow

RaceBannon said:

Air power was not as effective n WW2 as is commonly thought today. Germany was leveled, we were basically out of targets, and the US and USSR still had to slog all the way to Berlin to get the fucks to surrender

That is why Japan got two A bombs, they didn't surrender after the first one. The price to go to Tokyo would have been horrific for both sides

I think there is a lot to be said about the US not trying to win the war but that doesn't mean we? would have even if we did try

True that. German armaments production, in fact didn't peak until summer of 1944 after we had been bombing the shit out of them. In the case the Japan who knows if they would have surrendered after 2 A bombs, had the Soviets not invaded Manchuria at the same time (this ended all hope for some sort of a negotiated surrender with Stalin playing intermediary).

AZDuck

YellowSnow said:

AZDuck said:

Swaye said:

Precision guided munitions hasn't won shit in Afghanistan. An entrenched guerrilla enemy deeply dug in with the will to fight can only be beaten in a total war scenario. Scorched earth, then salt it with boots on the ground. We don't have the political will to win wars anymore. This is a nation of pussies.

Caveat with: and keep the boots on the ground for long enough that a genuinely popular pro-US regime emerges and has the ability to govern. See, e.g. South Korea.

People tend to forget that we have forced a tie in Asia before (i.e., 38th parallel) and that we did kill enough Chi-coms and N. Koreans to compel them to give up and accept said tie. In Vietnam, our goal was never to overthrow the North and reunite the country, but rather to simply preserve the régime in the South. That government sucked, of course, and corruption was off the charts, but there were still plenty of people in the South who didn't want the North to take over, or where, at least, indifferent.

Unlike Korea we never were able to kill enough NVA or VC or stop the flow of weapons and supplies coming in through Laos and Cambodia to compel the North Vietnamese/VC to give up. I think it's, at least, a chinteresting counter factual to consider how things would have turned out had in 1965- 67 we killed a shit ton more of their guys than we actually did and shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail (we were never successful in doing so).

One of the things you always here the NVA and VC veterans say in the documentary is that when fighting the Americans they had to get a close as possible so our guys couldn't call in air strikes. Would precision guided munitions have made a difference in those types of scenarios at all?

Well, since the Ho Chi Minh Trail went through Laos and Cambodia, what US bombing tended to do was radicalize those countries and undermine the (relatively) pro-US governments there. The invasion of Cambodia by Nixon didn't help much either.

The NK's were a little foolish in going full Stalin before the outcome of the war was decided. This pushed most of the SK population into a stronger resistance pose.

In Vietnam the NVA never really tried to conquer the South with its conventional forces until 1975. This was, I think, a lesson learned from Korea. A well-known quotation about the VN war is "This is a political war and it calls for discriminate killing. The best weapon would be a knife ... The worst is an airplane."

Sledog

Politicians picked the targets that often weren't really targets.

AZDuck

Sledog said:

Politicians picked the targets that often weren't really targets.

Little too conspiracy theory for me. Pretty sure LBJ wanted to win in Vietnam. He just micromanaged the fuck out of it.

RaceBannon

We? did have to be concerned about the USSR and the Chi Coms as well. Too much force and its WW3 all over again