Why aren't we backing a guerilla movement in North Korea?

Any fruitful discussion of Vietnam must at least begin with the facts, which this article misrepresents.

"The reasons we went into Vietnam to the present depth are varied; but largely academic."

The reasons for the eventual debacle were neither varied nor academic. Lyndon Johnson believed he must appear strong against the communist threat and not back down, but was unwilling (or afraid) to prosecute the war to its full extent. He provoked the incident leading to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving him power to vastly expand the U.S. presence. Then he and his CPA Sec. of Defense, Robert "Strange" McNamara (may his soul burn in hell), tried to micromanage the conduct of the war, down to choosing the allowed bombing targets each day.

"Years of bombing North Vietnam and "attriting" communist forces in South Vietnam neither broke Hanoi's will nor crippled its capacity to fight."

It's funny, having lived thru this period, I remember us bombing Laos and Cambodia (under Nixon), but I do not remember any significant bombing of North Vietnam. I have it on good authority (a friend who was in Naval Intelligence at the time) that the number one request of the Pentagon was to bomb Hanoi and the railroad lines bringing supplies from China and Russia, and to mine Haiphong harbor. This would probably have won the war in short order, but Johnson (and later, Nixon) were afraid of bringing Russia and China directly into the war, possibly creating another Korea.

The lessons of Vietnam were not to fight a war unless you are willing to employ all means necessary to win, and to keep civilians out of the day-to-day conduct of it.

Robert, I doubt North Korea could support such a movement. It's hard to have guerillas running around a totalitarian state that's near starvation.

JD, there certainly was lots of bombng of North Vietnam, and having just read an American Heritage article on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I don't think it was "provoked" by us, unless sailing warships in international waters near North Vietnam counts as provocation.

JD,

The Linebacker II B-52 strikes in December of 1972 bombed Hanoi back to the stone age, so I'd say that counts as a "significant bombing of North Vietnam". I realize I'll lose any hope of Kerry-like nuance by saying this, but it's only too bad it took so long for such a concentrated strike to occur. Had such actions happened sooner, it could have very well ended the war, and saved literally millions of lives.

Had Johnson and MacNamara fought in Vietnam to win, instead of using their carrot and stick tactics, the world's history might have turned out very differently.

Ed

As Ed notes, Nixon finally did break the logjam at the end of 1972 by ordering Linebacker II, and also he did order Haiphong harbor mined. This was naturally much criticized at the time but shook the resolve of the North Vietnamese sufficiently that they knuckled under and signed the Paris accords. The subtext was that the U.S. would enforce the treaty with its airpower should North Vietnam attempt another invasion of the South. That's where the real tragedy of 1975 lies; Congress, by preemptively forbidding the U.S. to use bombing to stop the NVA, rendered the Paris accords unenforceable and undid the achievements of Linebacker II. I don't think we would necessarily even have had to bomb Hanoi itself; plastering the Ho Chi Minh Trail would have cut off the NVA main supply route and rendered them vulnerable to ARVN counterattack - and let's not forget that even in the catastrophe, many ARVN units did resist fiercely and skillfully. With the backing of American airpower it's entirely likely that the 1975 offensive would have been thrown back, just as the 1972 offensive was.

It was never clear how we were supposed to win a war of attrition in Vietnam. We should have blockaded Haiphong and cut the HCM trail in 1965-66. Instead we let the NVA keep coming, molested only by air stirkes, and let them maintain their sanctuaries in Cambodia until 1970. There finally was an attempt to cut the trail in early 1971, but this effort, which used only ARVN ground forces, failed miserably.

Alas McNamara is still around and has been trying to achieve some measure of rehabilitation through his writings and via interviews. I have refused to see the new Errol Morris film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, as I couldn't bear listening to him for 100 minutes.

Vietnam certainly didn't provide a lot of useful PR for Communism; From the day the North and South were united, to today, it's been one of the poorest nations on Earth.

The US Army was fighting the wrong war against a guerilla army. They employed the same old US Grant doctrine of chucking as much firepower they could against the enemy but they'd have been better off taking the advice of the US Marines Corps who'd been fighting insurgency and guerilla warfare for decades.

Blaming LBJ for what happened isn't particularly fair since the brass simply adopted the wrong plan and persisted with it for far too long.

Finally somebody sort of gets it. Yes, Tet drove a stake through the heart of any anticommunist government in the South.

Orrin has a cept (half a concept) in thinking that an independent S. Vietnam could not have maintained. It not only could not have been maintained, it could not have been started.

There was no real demand for an independent, self-governing state based in Saigon. Still isn't, as far as I can tell.

As an experiment in nation-building, S. Vietnam ought to provide a few lessons for the 21st century, but it won't until the reason for the failure are understood.

It wasn't about airplanes.

Yet they lasted several years and fought fairly well even after we betrayed them.

Another interpretation would be that the North had sense enough and patience enough to wait to be sure the Americans would not rush back into the burning building.

I am not aware that the S. Vietnamese ever put up a meaningful fight, but go ahead, enlighten me about their victories.

Anyhow, they never did govern themselves.

Here's just one example:

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/99summer/sorley.htm

Who was governing them after we left?

A clique of turf aficionados.

'ARVN . . . stood and fought as never before.'

Like I said.

"I am not aware that the S. Vietnamese ever put up a meaningful fight"

Funny, but we no sooner started withdrawing than they proved themselves decent fighters.

Actually, that's not what your reference says.

What it says is that a conventional assault without air cover was vulnerable to disruption by tactical air -- which we knew already, from the Battle of Mortain in July-August 1944 and Korea in summer 1950.

Like I said, the N. Viets were patient enough to let the US leave for long enough not to be ready to interfere again and then they waltzed in.

Now you're just lying:

"In Military Region 1 the first five days of heavy assaults on the northern crescent of fire bases resulted in enemy advances as far south as the Dong Hai River, but there resistance by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) stiffened and the enemy paused to regroup and resupply. A later history of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN, aka the North Vietnamese Army) acknowledged the effective fight put up by ARVN defenders. "Relying on defensive fortifications already in place and on their reinforced troop strength," it recalled,

the enemy organized a defensive system consisting of three centers--Dong Ha, Ai Tu, and La Vang-Quang Tri. Hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers formed a barrier of steel surrounding these bases. Artillery fire bases and tank guns fired scores of thousands of rounds into our positions. All types of tactical aircraft and B-52 strategic bombers dropped hundreds of tons of bombs. Because the enemy had increased his troop strength and his fire support, and because he had changed his defensive plan, the wave of assaults made by our troops on 9 April was not successful.[16]

Sir Robert Thompson noted that the enemy had moved only 18 miles in three weeks, "not exactly an electric advance."[17] When the assault resumed, however, Quang Tri City was captured on 1 May and evacuation of Fire Support Base Nancy was forced two days later. The proximate cause of these reverses was withdrawal of the 20th Armored Squadron, ordered by 1st Armored Brigade commander Colonel Nguyen Trong Luat without notifying either higher headquarters or adjacent units. This move spooked other friendly forces into displacing prematurely and opened a convenient hole through which the attacking NVA drove deep into friendly lines.[18]

At the end of the third week, Abrams brought his field commanders in to review the situation and gain a little perspective. "There's been some poor performances," he acknowledged, then continued:

But there always have been poor performances--in war or anything else. And I think that there always will be. You've got a few guys do great, a few guys who are sort of satisfactory most of the time, and then you've got a few guys that are just miserable. But in this thing now, until this is over, there's no point--you've just got to accept the fact that there're going to be some poor performances. The trouble is that you're doing it with human beings. If you didn't have them, you wouldn't run into that. Some poor performances are not going to lose it. It's the good performances that are going to win it.

"I doubt the fabric of this thing could have been held together without US air," Abrams told his commanders,

but the thing that had to happen before that is the Vietnamese, some numbers of them, had to stand and fight. If they didn't do that, ten times the air we've got wouldn't have stopped them. So--with all the screwups that have occurred, and with all the bad performances that have occurred . . . we wouldn't be where we are this morning if some numbers of the Vietnamese hadn't decided to stand and fight.

On 24 April, Abrams cabled Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird his personal assessment of the situation. "The North Vietnamese have launched from their sanctuary in [North Vietnam] an all-out effort against the Republic of Vietnam," he began. "They are holding nothing back. Their last reserve division has been moved south near the DMZ and can enter the battle within two to four days after receiving orders." Four divisions and an independent regiment had already been brought down from North Vietnam, joining the seven divisions, 22 independent regiments, and seven artillery regiments already in South Vietnam. "It has been a conventional warfare battle employing the most sophisticated weapons."

"Overall," Abrams reported, "the South Vietnamese have fought well under extremely difficult circumstances. There has been a mixture of effective and ineffective performance, as in any combat situation, but on the whole the effective far outweighs the ineffective. Thus far the South Vietnamese have prevented the enemy from achieving his major objectives." One significant improvement from the battles of Lam Son 719 the previous year was the integration of air, armor, artillery, and infantry into a coherent whole. "This has been outstanding," said Abrams. "They have made great progress in this area during the past year in particular."
"

That's an almost fact-free report, but we can bring some outside information to bear.

120 battalions (apparently not all mobile). Piddling, compared with over 200 U.S. at our peak involvement.

18 mile penetration. Pretty deep. In other words, they broke the defense line.

The penetration, we can suppose, was stopped not by doughty ARVN resistance, though there may have been some of that, but by disruption of formations by tactical area behind the forward edge of the battle area.

only one unit threw down its weapons and ran. An improvement, after 10 years go trying to form a disciplined military force.

Abrams may have been a wildhaired tanker in 1944, but by 1972 he was a political general, and the U.S. policy was to declare S.Vietnam ready to take over for itself, whether it was or not. Under the circummstances, his praise is pretty tepid.

Last, of course, three years later, when ARVN had had the benefit of that much more training and preparation, it collapsed like a pricked balloon.

I'm not blaming them. I didn't want to die for Madame Thieu's race horses, either.

You actually said one thing there that's true and matters: "three years later"