What is the main reason the United States lost the Vietnam war?

Part 1

The Vietnam War is still clouded with controversy, even to this day the reasons behind the American defeat are analysed. Now just why did America lose the war? They were the greatest military force in the world. They had large numbers of well trained men who had the greatest weapons and a huge amount of support that no one in the world could hope to compete with. At the onset of the war no-one would have dreamed that this tiny country of Vietnam that had no industry, lacked training and had weapons that designed in the 1940s would defeat the greatest superpower the world had ever known. The reasons that America lost are many; however they can all be traced back to one key failure that is a lack of strategic understanding on the part of The United States. Tactically the Americans were doing everything right and for a long period of time the anti-war movement was negligible.

The American Tactics in the war were all good ones. Practically every single pitched battle in the war was a crushing victory for the United States. The use of helicopters to evacuate wounded men made it so that within half and hour of getting shot men were back in hospitals getting treated . Every single conventional measure of how victory is accomplished favoured the Americans. They lost far fewer men then the North Vietnamese 58,193 to over 1.5 million . They destroyed large amounts of Vietnamese munitions and the Americans had overwhelming Airpower. These are the factors that formed the basis of every single war of the past 60 years the idea of war was to kill more of them then they killed of you and destroy there capability to wage war by destroying roads, bridges and industrial capacity. However even though on those counts America won why did they lose?

One of the best examples of this idea of American tactical victory is the Tet Offensive looking at this battle from a purely military perspective it is huge win for the United States. The North Vietnamese failed in their key objective of starting a revolution in South Vietnam. This battle devastated the Vietcong’s intelligence gathering capabilities and they lost more men in that battle then the US lost in the entire war. They failed to realise how mobile the US forces were and even when the managed to hold certain parts of cities they were quickly retaken. They failed to make any real dent in the US forces. The other major failure of the Tet Offensive is something that is often overlooked in analysis. The Vietcong lost a lot of support from South Vietnamese due to the fact that many Vietnamese changed who they supported based on who appeared to be the strongest. After the costly failure of the Tet Offensive the weaker side appeared to be the Vietcong. An American advisor from Tay Ninh said “Many segments [villages or provinces] that earlier could be described as neutralist or, at best, lacking in support for the government have now moved into the government camp.” The Tet Offensive proved to be a costly failure for the North Vietnamese yet in the end it is their greatest triumph. The Tet Offensive can be seen as the beginning of the end to Americas hopes for victory. The Tet Offensive has to be seen as a psychological victory for the North Vietnamese that very fact that they managed to take the cities was a huge blow to American morale. Even military men who knew in actual fact it was a defeat were taken “by surprise and its strength, length and intensity prolonged this shock”

This is the point where the media changed its tune. Up until that point the vast majority or articles were positive. This kind of article is characterised by an article from The Herald in 1966 entitled “Digger Aids Viet Victory” . In the article there is not a single negative thing mentioned all of it is positive with quotes from American Advisors saying that “I would be glad to slap an American Uniform on them [The South Vietnamese Army Unit]” . In fact in the entire paper there is no negative Vietnam coverage by the paper and only one negative letter in the opinion section. The whole tone of the articles are that of the “our brave boys” variety. However post Tet Offensive the tone of the Media pieces would change drastically the tone of these reports can be characterised by the headlines of the major newspaper of the time it read “Where are we winning?”The other major example of the change in mood is Walter Cronkite’s report on the Tet Offensive phrases like “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion” jump out showing the feelings that were only to become stronger in the following years of the Vietnam War. Cronkite who was known as “the most trusted man in America” proved to be a catalyst in the anti-war movement after this event the anti-war movement changed from something that only college students were interested in to something that affected all Americans. The role of the media in the anti-war movement cannot be overstated. In the last opinion poll taken before the Tet Offensive 61% of Americans identified themselves as hawks while only a few short months later the doves would outnumber the hawks. However the anti-war movement is not the reason that America lost it is a symptom of the actual cause. The anti-war movement came to fruition because the media started to report the war negatively. But why did the media start to report the conflict in a negative light? They did it because it became clear that America was losing and could not get out of the war easily.

The major reasons that America lost the war were their lack of cohesive strategy and a failure to understand what insurgency warfare required. They tried a whole range of strategies over the course of the war varying from the search and destroy tactics of the early years of the war to the Vietnamization that characterised the latter years. However their use of heavy bombing, Napalm and armed reconnaissance angered the locals and increased support for the Vietcong. In a way they were trapped in a catch 22 situation. They needed to destroy the Vietcong in order to win but by their attempts to destroy it all they did was increase the size of the Vietcong. Many individual groups tried different tactics the most notable of these were the American Marines and the Australian Task force. Both these groups disagreed with the idea of Search and Destroy that consisted of using two forces one as the hammer and the other as an anvil this strategy made a lot of noise and pre warned the Vietcong thus been next to useless. . The Marines thought that this kind of strategy would be a waste of manpower and would bleed the United States.Many of the other problems with U.S strategy can be seen in how ground commander dealt with the attrition idea of Westmoreland. The commander felt that a war of attrition hurt the Americans more then it hurt the Vietcong because the Americans lacked the manpower to follow Westmoreland’s strategy as a direct result of this lack of manpower the commander used the thing that they had plenty of that is firepower which in turn caused large amounts of civilian causalities making more people join the Vietcong. The Marines would have preferred to use a strategy they called the Combined Action Platoon programme which called for small groups of marines and the ARVN to live in villages and thus deny the Vietcong access to the intelligence and supplies that the villagers provided.

The Australians felt that a hearts and minds approach would be the best way to win and in many ways they were right. This kind of strategy produced outstanding results within weeks of the strategy being tried the Vietnamese and the Australians were playing volleyball together. However there still were problems with this strategy loyalty to Australians did not translate into support for Saigon.[ This was because Saigon was not a part of these operations and thus whilst the locals liked the Australians they were still fearful of the GVN and the second the Australians left they went back to the Vietcong.

Part 1