The Vietnam War was 

a military campaign launched by North Vietnam against South Vietnam. The

Vietnamese civil war began in 1959. The United States supported the South, while China and Russia

supported the North. In 1965, the United States officially entered the war in response to North

Vietnam's attack on a U.S. military ship. U.S involvement ended in 1973. The war ended in 1975.

Vietnam was the most heavily bombed country in history. More than 6.1 million tons of bombs were

dropped, compared to 2.1 million tons in World War II. U.S. planes dumped 20 million gallons of

herbicides to defoliate Viet Cong hiding places. It decimated 5 million acres of forest and 500,000 acres

of farmland [1].

The War in Focus

The American image of land warfare during the Cold War as a whole is dominated by the

Vietnam War for a number of reasons. This was a lengthy conflict, one in which the United

States, the world’s leading military power, was involved most intensively. As the sole major

televised ground-conflict during the Cold War, the war was extensively reported from on the

ground, with print journalism supported by impressive photography, and was followed with great

attention around the world, much of it critical [2]. As the war was also a failure for the United

States, it was both analyzed there and attracted great attention elsewhere—being seen as an

augury of a new age of warfare, that of revolutionary warfare, and more particularly as a victory

for Maoist ideas of revolutionary violence and strategy, ideas contrasted with those of the Soviet

Union.

Moreover, American failure appeared to demonstrate that air power had not redefined warfare to

the extent that its protagonists argued. The Vietnam War led to much discussion of the merits

and limitations of bombing to achieve strategic objectives. Although it could bring significant
tactical and operational advantages, the Americans failed to use bombing to bring victory or,

indeed, to direct the responses of the North Vietnamese, except for an investment in anti-aircraft

capability. American failure also showed that nuclear capability reduced the significance of

warfare, whether conventional or not. All of these points had, and still have, considerable value,

but none justifies the extent to which the Vietnam War, or rather this Vietnam war, dominates

discussion, and notably so at the popular level.

America Increases its Commitment

The Americans faced tactical and operational difficulties in operating in South Vietnam but

overcame them. Initially focused on defending coastal areas that were strongholds of South

Vietnamese power and essential for American deployment, the Americans gradually built up an

impressive logistical infrastructure, then moved into the interior. The Americans were able to

advance into parts of South Vietnam which had been outside the control of Saigon and to inflict

serious blows on the Viet Cong in the Mekong delta. In addition, direct mass Viet Cong attacks

on American positions were generally repulsed with heavy casualties, for example at the siege of

Plei Me in the Central Highlands in 1965 [3].

The Americans sought to advance throughout South Vietnam, establishing “firebases” from

which they could mount large-scale search-and-destroy operations, in order to defeat the large

units being deployed by their opponents and erode their strength. Land warfare was becoming far

more mobile as a result of the internal combustion engine. The helicopter played a major role in

this extension of activity, especially with the use of the new 1 st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). In

addition, the environment, notably the forest cover and the lack of good roads, was generally not

appropriate for armor. The use of the helicopter represented a successful operational and tactical
engagement with the situation. Such success, however, was only possible because the North

Vietnamese did not have human-portable, surface-to-air missiles until late in the war. Had they

done so earlier, the usage of helicopters would have been extremely difficult, as was the case for

Portugal in Africa, which would have forced the Americans to change their tactics to more

conventional methods of advance, supply and retreat.

In the event, against the background of the very different experience of the Korean War, the

American army gradually learned the necessary tactical skills to campaign successfully in South

Vietnam, in turn, squandering this lesson by the practice of rotating units out of the combat zone

too quickly. Nevertheless, the strategy underpinning American land warfare was problematic as,

in parallel, was the very different strategy guiding American air warfare against North Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive: Tactics and Ramifications

There was also the problem of forcing conflict on opponents, a problem underlined by the

politically imposed necessity of using air but not ground forces in attacking the opponents’ base

area of North Vietnam. Within South Vietnam itself, there was no concentration of opposing

power that could be rapidly fixed and readily destroyed as, in very different circumstances, the

Israelis were to do against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967, and the Indians and Pakistanis to

sought to do in successive conflicts in 1965 and 1971 [4].

The attacks mounted under cover of the Lunar New Year celebrations of Tet were launched in

the mistaken belief that they would engender a popular uprising. In turn, over-optimistic

American assumptions about enemy casualties in the border battles of late 1967 were matched by

an inability to believe that a full-scale attack on the cities would be mounted. This was a serious
failure of assessment. About 85,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops attacked beginning

on January 30, 1968, being eventually defeated with heavy losses over the following month [5].

There was a recurrence of the failure of attacks on French positions in 1951. Nevertheless, North

Vietnamese military and political strategies did not depend on continual success.

Having defeated these attacks, American effectiveness in counter-insurgency increased from

1968, but, in part for tactical and operational reasons, it still proved difficult to “fix” opponents

and to force them to fight on American terms. Nevertheless, in 1969, the Americans inflicted

serious blows on the Viet Cong who had lost many of their more experienced troops in the Tet

Offensive, and achieved little in 1969. Although the Americans were able to repulse attacks,

their counter-insurgency strategy was undermined by the unpopularity of the South Vietnamese

government, by Viet Cong opposition and intimidation, and by increasingly vocal domestic

American criticism of what appeared an increasingly intractable conflict [6].

The issues facing the United States in South Vietnam were matched by the experience of their

allies, each of whom had their own particular approaches and combat styles. Analysis of the

Australian pacification activity in Phuoc Tuy province, as of the Americans in Binh Dinh

province, question the thesis that the policy had succeeded and was therefore wrecked by the

eventual pull out. At the same time, it is clear that the Viet Cong, which had been able to

compete openly with the government in 1966, was, by the close of 1972, forced to operate

clandestinely. Yet, there has also been a focus on the “inherent weaknesses in the South

Vietnamese state” that in part was a matter of the webs of patronage and corruption, but that,

more generally, was a consequence of “the immaturity of the South Vietnamese state.” This
situation greatly affected military preparedness and morale. Training was also poor, and the army

depended on the Americans for firepower and logistics.

The Easter Offensive of 1972 and the Failure to Translate Operational Strategy

A standard view, notably in the United States, emphasizes the role, in the eventual North

Vietnamese failure, of the American Linebacker I air campaign which hit the invasion force’s

supply system, particularly their fuel stocks. This account underplays the role of South

Vietnamese defenders, who held off the invasion, and the problems the North Vietnamese

confronted in mastering high-tempo maneuver warfare. Both were also to be issues for Egypt

and Syria when attacking Israel in 1973, and for Iraq when attacking Iran in 1980, in all cases

without success. The Soviet Union could provide impressive weaponry, particularly tanks, but it

proved far more difficult to transfer the doctrine and techniques of effective operational warfare,

and notably so if faced by determined opposition. As more generally in military history,

capabilities—whether in attack or defense—were focused, accentuated, minimized, or offset, by

the characteristics of the opponent. Moreover, Soviet operational art was devised for the

circumstances of the North European Plain and was not easy to translate to very different

environmental and military conditions [7].

In 1972, the North Vietnamese failed to make the best use of tanks, which reflected both an

operational inability to gain mobility and achieve particular objectives, and a tactical failure to

get and utilize infantry-armor coordination. Instead, as with the Iraqis in 1980, the tanks were

used by the North Vietnamese as an assault force on South Vietnamese positions, indeed
essentially as mobile artillery. This had the effect of squandering the initiative in operational

terms, while providing targets for American air attack. On the eve of the American withdrawal in

1973, neither side had won the war on the ground, a repetition of the situation for the French

there in 1954 and in Algeria in 1962, which was not a comparison the Americans would have

welcomed. However, the Americans, like the French in 1954, were under serious fiscal pressure

and suffering from rising domestic problems.

Has the US Learned from Its Experience in the Vietnam War?

Perhaps the most observable lesson the US failed to learn from Vietnam is the necessity for the

right motivations to intervene in a conflict, as well as the necessity of a structured strategy and

clear goals. US reasoning for intervening in Vietnam was clear, yet this does not detract from the

inherent lack of sustainability in the perceived motives for doing so. Under the doctrine of

containment, the goal was to prevent the spread of communism by preventing the fall of the

guardian to Central Asia, South Vietnam ( a policy enshrined in ‘domino theory’) (Powers, 1969,

p. 855). The US’s obsession with this doctrine and its stalwart determination to prevent the

spread of this evil ideology led the Americans “deeper and deeper into tragedy” (O’Malley, n.d.)

in Southeast Asia. Yet, what the US fails to comprehend is the reality that you cannot defeat an

ideology with bombs and bullets (Robertson, 2015). Ideologies are a normative collection of

ideas and ideals and, given their metaphysical nature, cannot be defeated by more traditional

methods the US employs combatting its enemies, thus serving as an unsustainable and

ambiguous justification for war. It appears US administrations of the last two decades are yet to

appreciate this reality given the continued, and frivolous, use of ‘defeating Islamist extremism’

as rationalisation for its multiple wars on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria (Lieven, 2018, p.
388). Trump’s proclamation across Twitter that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria” (Trump, 2018),

only demonstrates further a false exaggeration of the US’s abilities to defeat an ideology and a

total lack of appreciation for the lessons Vietnam could and should have taught them.

Similarly, the attempted methods employed to combat ‘ideological enemies’, particularly via

‘nation-building’ deployed in Vietnam, and now in Afghanistan, shows a failure to learn from its

experiences. Whilst such efforts are commendable, the US’s efforts to help restructure in

Vietnam via the ‘Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support’ failed to

deliver “any effective nation-building” (Gawthorpe, 2014). Clearly, the US has failed to learn

from its own experiences, given its insistence on embarking on “morally ambiguous” (Herring,

2019) experiments in nation-building that only demonstrate the limited utility of American

military power in conflicts that are political and ideological in nature.

A consequence of these previous two factors and a failure to learn from previous lessons is the

frequency with which the US is drawn into unsustainable drawn-out conflicts following

Vietnam. Certainly, one of the glaring oversights of America’s foreign policy in Vietnam was the

lack of clarity in their strategy. Christened “the stalemate machine” (Menand, 2018), their flawed

military and political strategy for the region not only cost the US any chance of success, but

made what was perceived as an easily-winnable conflict into an operational quagmire. In

Operation Desert Storm we see the same lack of long-term strategic thinking, a clear indictment

of the fact that again lessons were not learnt. This failure is evident from the decision to end

intervention unilaterally before Saddam had been chastened, condemning the US to a long-term,

unavoidable presence in the Gulf to contain Iraq (Mahnken, 2011). Ultimately, the use of

containment as a doctrine for military intervention combined with ineffective and unsustainable
strategies demonstrate a failure to learn from experiences in Southeast Asia, leading to

successive foreign policy engagements that are little more than a Vietnam redux.

It is clear that America still has a lot to learn from the conflict in Southeast Asia. A naïve

commitment to a disproved doctrine of containment, an ignorant lack of appreciation for the

value of public support and blind faith in their own exceptionality clearly reveals that the ghost

of Vietnam is still omnipresent. Its lessons are something successive US administrations are still

yet to appreciate given their insistence in maintaining ill-fated and unsustainable foreign policy

ventures. Thus, until America welcomes the lessons Vietnam has to offer, they will be

condemned to repeat them, which will only prove more damaging as the years continue.
References

1) Stoda, Kevin. "In the Long Shadow of the Vietnam War: American Post-Vietnam War Era

Individual, Collective and Cultural Memory Since Vietnam."

2) Schmitz, David F. The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion. Rowman & Littlefield

Publishers, 2005.

3) KENNEDY’S, P. R. E. S. I. D. E. N. C. Y. "The 1960s and the Vietnam War." (2012).

4) Wirtz, James J. The Tet offensive: intelligence failure in war. Cornell University Press, 1994.

5) Guan, Ang Cheng. "Decision-Making Leading to the Tet Offensive (1968)-The Vietnamese

Communist Perspective." Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 341-353.

6) Herring, George C., and George C. Herring. America's longest war: the United States and

Vietnam, 1950-1975. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.

7) Klein, Gary M. Operational Art in the People's Army of Vietnam: From the 1972 Easter Offensive

to the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Campaign. US Army School for Advanced Military Studies Fort

Leavenworth United States, 2018.