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FirmhandKY -> RE: Neocons better STFU and get to work! (3/29/2007 1:18:07 AM)
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SM,
The first thing I'd like to say is thank you for a fairly calm and reasonable set of questions.
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ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
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ORIGINAL: FirmHandKY
Because the will of the Congressional leadership is the target of this war. The soldiers and battles in Iraq are simply the stage used to attack this more important target.
If the will to win is there in American political leadership, and the people, there is nothing the Iraq insurgents and AQ can hope to do to win the war on the battlefield.
If the will to win is there in the English Parliamentary leadership, there is nothing the American insurgents can hope to do to win the war on the battlefield.
This is correct. Although the king was probably the more important actor.
Do you know the reasons that the British gave the US it's independence? Ask Lady E or NG. I bet they can give point of view a little different than what you remember from history class.
The British could have easily won the Revolution. They came close many times. Why did they throw in the towel?
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ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
If the will to win is there in American political leadership, and the people, there is nothing the north Vietnamese insurgents can hope to do to win the war on the battlefield.
Correct. And the NV never did win a major battle or the military conflict against the US.
However, winning battles doesn't necessarily win the war. Look at the Tet Offensive. It was a major military defeat for the NVA, yet a disastrous political defeat for the American government, so that it is often considered the turning point in the war. Why? Because of a change in the popular will of the American people.
The North's strategy was called "the long war". It was a war of attrition and a war of national will.
Some interesting quotes:
Interviews with North Vietnam Army General Nguyen Duc Huy
Interview in Vietnam in December 2003 and January 2004.
VN: After the war, Giap told a group of Western reporters that Communist losses in the Tet Offensive were so devastating that if the Americans had kept up that level of military pressure much longer North Vietnam would have been forced to negotiate a peace on American terms. Do you agree?
Huy: If the American army had fought some more, had continued, I don't know. Maybe. I can't say what would have happened.
Interview with NVA General Tran Van Tra
(The field commander of military operations in the South, Tran Van Tra was North Vietnam's counterpart to General William Westmoreland.)
Tra: We had to change our plan and make it different from when we fought the Saigon regime, because we now had to fight two adversaries -- the United States and South Vietnam. We understood that the U.S. Army was superior to our own logistically, in weapons and in all things. So strategically we did not hope to defeat the U.S. Army completely. Our intentions were to fight a long time and cause heavy casualties to the United States, so the United States would see that the war was unwinnable and would leave.
Tra: Strategically it was a war of attrition. Tactically we tried to destroy U.S. units. We tried to cause heavy casualties and damage the U.S. units so much that the U.S. side would realize that there would be no retreat and that the U.S. was waging war against a whole nation.
Silent Lessons From U.S. Involvement in East Asia
Driving the Americans out of South Vietnam had been the chief tactical goal of Communist military strategists since 1965, and as recently as September 1967 General Giap [the chief North Vietnamese military strategist] had reaffirmed that objective in his annual review of the war, a tract entitled "Big Victory, Great Task." Acknowledging that the Americans had proved a far tougher foe than the French, that the superiority of U.S. firepower and mobility posed serious problems for his own troops, and that Communist tactics were in need of revision, Giap in effect conceded that the Communists were not winning the war. But neither, in his view were they losing it. For all their failings, they had succeeded in depriving the Americans of the one thing the U. S. wanted, and needed, most: a quick victory. They had forced the Americans to commit themselves to a protracted war, and in so doing they had tipped the odds in their favor. The war might last "five, ten, twenty or more years," he wrote, but as long as the Communists kept on fighting, eventually the Americans would leave.
General Giap's own long term strategy was to bleed the U. S. until it agreed to a settlement that satisfied The North Vietnamese, which explains, in part, why the Communists were willing to endure enormous casualties, as in the Tet Offensive of 1968 which was not intended to be a decisive operation, but one episode in a protracted war that might last "five, ten, or twenty years." Essentially, Giap was repeating to the United States what Ho Chi Minh had warned the French a generation before: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." General Giap had developed a strategy to combat the American technological advantage -- patience.
Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, when asked in a 1995 interview, "How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?", responded, "By fighting a long war which would break their [the American] will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, "We don't need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out." His thoughts were prescient, as Colonel Tin received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam forces in April, 1975.
VIETNAM: LESSONS LEARNED:
The U.S. civilian and military leadership failed to heed the lessons of the past during the Vietnam war. They underestimated the enemy and the nature of the war.
The collective U.S. leadership failed to consider the historical context or the Vietnam war. Adequate consideration was not given to the previous conflicts in Vietnam. Over the centuries, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the French have attempted to exert control over Indochina unsuccessfully. Out of this experience, the Vietnamese have forged a strong collective identity. Its leadership has demostrated a strong national resolve and resistance to foreign domination as was evidenced by the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. The conflict with the U.S. was seen as just a continuation of 2000 years of foreign oppression. The North Vietnamese were prepared to accept limitless causalties in its conflict with the United States. In formulating a strategy to defeat the North Vietnamese, the U.S. military leaders did not completely understand the nature of the war. The U.S. civilian leadership fail to invoke the national will with a declaration of war. This produced a strategic vulnerability that our enemy was able to exploit.
...
The ability to accept the casualties which the U.S. war of attrition imposed was central to the success of North Vietnamese strategy. Their attacks were designed to have maximum psychological effect. They were able to choose the time and place of most of their attacks that were most advantageous to them. Therefore, with the exception of the TET offensive, they were able to control their casualties by avoiding contact with opposing forces when desired. In effect this attrition strategy was a test of wills which the United States could not endure.
Neither could intensive bombing of the North Vietnamese break their resolve. The United States dropped 7.8 million tons of bombs during this war, an amount greater than the total dropped by all aircraft in all of World War II. Since the North Vietnamese, unlike Germany in World War II, did not possess munitions plants or industries vital to its war effort, targets such as roads, bridges, and transportation complexes were targeted. Such targets could be quickly repaired, moved, or circumvented and therefore had to be bomb again and again. Nor could intensive bombing curtail the flow of men and supplies over the Ho Chi Minh trail. Evidence suggests that the heavy bombing only increased the resolve of the North Vietnamese resistance. Strategic targets in major population centers could not be bombed due to political considerations. General Curtis Lemay, U.S. Air Force advised "bombing them into the stone age." Yet in 1972 after the most intensive bombing of the North had destroyed virtually all industrial, transportation, and communications facilities built since 1954, flattened three major cities and twenty-nine province capitals, the North's party leaders replied that they had defeated the U.S. "air war of destruction". Short of nuclear destruction, or an all out invasion of North Vietnam, as some advocates suggested, the air war alone could not force the North Vietnamese to succumb to pressures that the British and Germans had survived during orld War II.
Only much later did American officials begin to perceive the determination of the North Vietnamese. Dean Rusk, secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson, finally admitted in 1971 that he had personally underestimated the ability of the North Vietnamese to resist.
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ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
I am curious KY, since we were at about 50,000 when we left Vietnam, how many more would you have sent to die? Oh, and nope, no whining about which party was in charge since you refuse to admit how badly Bush has fucked this one up. So, how many more men would you have thrown on THAT funeral pyre? 10,000, another 50,000?
You show a basic misapprehension about war, and what I am saying. The question is: which side has the stronger will (the stronger stomach if you will) to win a war.
The Vietnamese suffered many more casualities than the US did, and from a smaller population base. Yet they never quit. The US quit.
Why do you believe that I don't think Bush has "fucked anything up" as you say? I don't believe I've said anything other than: 1.) I think the war is worth fighting and 2.) I think we now have a strategy that can win.
Anything else you may attribute to me is from your own prejudice and beliefs, I'm afraid. (I may have also said that dismantling Suddam's armed forces was a good decision).
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ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
How many more on this one in Iraq? I would dearly love to see us pull something other than genocide out of it but one country can only take so much incompetence and greed before it simply self destructs.
The casuality rates in Iraq are stunningly small for such a war, for such a length. And it isn't the number of casualities anyway, it's the will to win, as I've repeated constantly. You are using the incorrect metric.
FirmKY
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