Uh, No...

Jetfuel is basically kerosene.  Very simple and common to refine.   It is widely available throughout the world and the Americans' didn't pressure other countries not to sell JetFuel to the South Vietnamese...

The South Vietnamese Air Force was at best a ground support tactical air force, helicopters (UH-1 Hueys, Few CH-47s), fixed wings props like O-1 & O-2 Cessna spotter planes, A-1 Skyraiders, AC-47 twins.

Jets were all "light jets" like the A-37 Cessna Tweets, and F-5 tiger light jet fighters.

No Bombers, no Tankers, no ECM or AWACS...

The North Vietnamese Air Force was well armed with ample Mig 21s, along with Mig-19s & Mig 17s, and a considerable SAM & AAA capability (many said the fiercest at the time anywhere in the world).   The introduction of the SA-7 MANPAD took a lot of the ability away from the South Vietnamese, as Helicopters, Prop Planes, and even jets like the A-37 were all vulnerable to foot soldiers at any time of day or night.

The South Vietnamese Air Force was not a threat in any way to the North.   The North's mechanized forces would be vulnerable to US F-4s, A-6 & A-7s with smart bombs and guided ATG missiles, not to mention B-52 Bombings of the invading Mechanized North Vietnamese Armies,  but Washington was OUT of the fight and without US Air Power, the South was finished...

Yup with same ROE and politics outcome does not change,

So we win 50% more battles. Does that change the spinelessness of our politicians who refuse to actually fight the war?

We could have fought Vietnam with WW2 tech, and with better leadership would have won.

I think you said "tech" when you meant "will".

Baby Boombers had none.

This exactly.  There was no will to win and the rules of bombing got people killed.

We fought a bunch of arabs with today's technology and, just like Vietnam, the left fucked us.   Again.

The tech had nothing to do with it.   Both conflicts came down to traitorous domestic leftists.

It was the ROE, not the technology.

The need was to fight it with World War 2 Tactics - Seize the Territory of your enemy and advance to put them under.

Worked for Italy, Germany & Japan.  Wasn't easy, but it does the trick.

As Curtis LeMay said, "I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting"

&

"Actually I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary than it is to use more. If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle."

My favorite and the truth...

...Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.

Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 560-561.

This 100% in agreement...

The fact that North Vietnam had an air force 2 weeks after we started hitting targets in the north (let alone had operational air fields and an air force years after the war started) is a prime example of fighting a war with both hands tied. behind your back.

Linebacker I & II combined with Operation Pocket Money showed how quickly the North could be beat down if we took the gloves off (we still were fighting with one hand behind our back because of Russia and China but at least not both). With the harbors shut down (Haiphong harbor handled 85% of the supplies coming into North Vietnam) and an aggressive bombing campaign the North couldn't resupply SAM and fighters fast enough to keep up with their losses.

This. With what we had back in the day we would have shut it down with an invasion of Hanoi. It's not always what you have it's how you use it.

No.  Look at Afghanistan.  We've been there for 17yrs?   How's that modern warfare working out for us?

As others said you'd definitely have less casualties but the end result would still be the same.

Far fewer casualties, and fewer numbers of aircraft shot down due to AAA or SAM's.  The real question is, how well could (or would) either China or Russia support North Vietnam?  I'm sure the current China is better equipped than Russia, but would they even want to?  Without that support, and with full backing to the South Vietnamese, things would look a lot differently.

technology was never the problem for us in vietnam, military doctrine, ROE and political meddling was the problem from the get go.

If we had to fight it again today? With potus Trump and Secretary of war Mattis? Yes we win handily. Cambodia gets fucked up too. Moab production would be 24/7. Drone striking would be 24/7. No reporters allowed either.

My comments are in red.

Wanna see a modern day Vietnam? Take a look at Afghanistan; certainly not a perfectly congruent comparison, but there are some sobering parallels to be examined, nonetheless.

oh please, if the public was calling for his head on a plate in the numbers and with the ferocity that people were for LBJ and nixon trump would roll over like a bitch in heat.

mattis would bring the hurt with a vengeance though.

Dat ROE doe.

I wouldn't want to take that ride either!

Also OP, don't forget, the enemy gets a vote too. Our tech might be better now but so is theirs.

Plenty were shot down back then. 19 B-52s lost to hostile fire, 31 total lost.

We could have told the French to eat shit and die, built a port in Hanoi, and SEATO could have actually been legitimate with a unified Vietnam as a member. We went full retard instead.

If you want to be red pilled, read up on Deer Team.

No difference whatsoever the political will to win just didn’t exist.The US military was asked to do the impossible by an idot of a SECDEF and POTUS that then told commanders how to do their jobs

We would be too busy trying to get DCGS-A working and attending sharp and resiliency training.

Would modern entail Mattis replacing McNamarra as SecDef?

Oh, i forgot how they're not doing that right now. The best part about Trump is he dgaf. Lil Charlie about to get fucked up, bigly.

Which modern day weapons system would have changed the mindset of the S. Vietnamese people from complete disinterest in fighting and winning the war?

And which modern day weapons system would have prevented Watergate, which resulted in the third-column liberal Democrats taking congress in a wave election in 1974 and tying Gerald Ford's hands in '75 by cutting off all assistance to the S. Vietnamese military?

No, the war was unwinnable from the start if Nixon's Vietnamization strategy was ever going to be a part of it.

We fought Al-Qaeda and ISIS with today's military technology.

We doin' a'ight (ain't cheap, doe), but there's a part of me that wonders how much politics matters, more than tech.

A balls to the wall effort would have won it with 40s tech. That said, IMO, yes, with todays tech we probably would have. Way better medical, drones, real night vision / thermal, cruise missile / drone strikes on NVA leadership etc. We'd also have ARs that worked better...

we were fighting a people who were willing to sacrifice and fight every man, and  woman and child...to the bitter end, live in caves and do anything to resist us.

The only "winning" possible when fighting an adversary like that would be extermination and genocide...

take a look at Afghanistan right now.

so will technology overcome that? No, might expedite the extermination, but I don't think that is what we would want to call "winning"

That could work.

Also, use timetravel to replace Westmoreland with a seasoned 1991 era Schwarzkopf, and don't let politicians make him stop short of the objective this time.

I see no evidence that the Vietnamese had more will than Japan did. I'm not sure any population in history has ever been that fanatical...including the NVA/Cong or the Islamic terrorists of today. Bunch of pussies compared to Japan. There are a billion Muslims and they 'produce' maybe a couple hundred suicide bombers per year. If the emperor demanded it, he could have got millions of japanese people...men, women, kids...to strap bombs to themselves and do the suicide bomb thing. It's a whole 'nother level of fanaticism. This is a 22 year old man that is about to kill himself for the emperor....with a SMILE ON HIS FACE.



fuggin' terrifying.

We are doing it in Syria right now.

An absurd fantasy. Ho Chi Minh didn't suddenly become a Communist because the US chose to support the French.

The Democratic Party cost us the war.

Which is the whole point of taking ground and killing the enemy...

The Japanese figured going in they had 6 months to a year tops to knock the US out of the war and try to get a peace treaty while the Allies (USA, British, Dutch) were down.

After Midway, and especially after the island hop campaign moved forward to Saipan (bases within flying distance of B-29s) recapture of the Philipines (cut off the flow of oil & rice) that the war was as good as over unless they could grind us down to lose the will to fight by bloody attrition (thus the kamikaze and fight to the last man battles of Iwo Jima & Okinawa - Their only way to an honorable peace (as the Japanese saw it) was to make the war so bloody the USA would lose heart and want to settle it short of "Unconditional Surrender" as the allies called for ...

Which is what happened to a degree in Vietnam.   The American Public was reeling from the brutality of war coming in on TV news, and when the Tet offensive showed how the Communist Vietnamese were NOT acting like they were "the crippled and defeated losers", it took the war to Washington (LBJ Announced he wouldn't run again), and the airwaves with Walter Cronkite announced on TV that the war was "unwinnable" as Washington had promised.

The North Vietnamese were fought to a standstill prior to Tet, but Westmoreland and LBJ had sold the Public the communist were licked and ready to fold any day now - victory was just around the corner - the light at the end of the tunnel, ect....  Tet was a communist masterstroke, born of utter desperation, that broke the American Public from the Leadership who had lied about the progress of the war.

Imagine if Hitler has launched the last ditch gasp of Battle of the Bulge, and the fact that Germans were still attacking and suddenly beating the American Army (whom the public had been told may be home for Christmas of 1944), including over running the US Embassy in London, and with swarms of enemy troops making corridinated attacks in the "occupied cities of Paris, Nice, Birmingham, Glasgow, Brussels, ect...  made it look like IKE & FDR had lied to the American public to the point that FDR decided to quit the presidency & get out of the White House...

Just Sentinels and Avengers would make a big difference. A B-1 with a Sniper pod would wreck shop as well. F-22s would be knocking down enemy fighters left and right and B-2s would be killing strategic targets 24/7.

We have had total Air Supremacy over Afghanistan since Day 1 of the war there.

We've now been at war there for how many years?

How close are we to "Victory'?

Storm'n Norman didn't go to Bagdad to wrap it up and "win" the war...   I don't think it would have gone any better for him to occupy Iraq in 1991, as it did later for us later in 2003....

We are experts at Kicking Ass & Blowing Up Stuff, but the whole "Nation Building" thing is something else...

Vietnam - fell to communist - now we trade and visit with them.
Somalia - shithole of anarchy - still an epicenter of insane African violence.
Balkans - nominally "at peace", but really the dysfunctional crime center of Europe.
Haiti - corrupt shithole anyway you look at it...
Georgia - got feisty with the Russians as if they were already a part of NATO. They were not and the Russians then pushed their sh!t WAY in and made them toe the Moscow line.
Ukraine - see Georgia above, except the Russians also sliced off huge chunks of their land (Crimea & the industrial Eastern Ukraine)

Korea was the last sure "win" I could call in that category for sure...  but we are still dealing with Nutty North Korea, which now has Nukes so the whole "Korean Thing" is still up in the air (but hooray for South Korea!!)

Could call Panama a win because we removed Noriega. (but then some folks think we put him in power there sooooo....)

O.K. - Grenada for a sure win!!

We'll never "win" Afghanistan and shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Or in Vietnam.

Guess that is / was the point.   There are some fights you can whip the hell out of your opponent from Day 1 with our Whiz Bang Ultra Tech, but you still won't win the L-O-N-G run because they can and will keep coming back like cockroaches.   Due to fanatism, religious or political ideology, they will just stay low when times are bad, then pop back up when times are better for them.

The whole Sun-Zu "Art of War" thing...

All that would have changed is a drastic drop of KIAs due to advances in medical tech/knowledge.

The nation’s will to fight was never there.

Same communist media ?

we had it then, and we have it 100X now...

In before the chain email saying we would have won the war if we fired another 5.56 round.

Canister rounds on human wave attacks, though. Abrams would probably be sunk in mud half the time and make zero difference on a strategic level, but shit like that would probably take our already lopsided casualty ratio and turn it up to 11.

The Romans solved those kinds of enemies a couple millennia ago. Nobody has the stomach for modernizing Roman strategic thinking though, because while effective it's pretty fucking ugly.

Public didn't have the stomach to do wants needed then and even less so today.  War is hell.

Surprised they didn’t have 105mm and 155mm canister rounds back then.  Good for makind zipper head stew.