We're there so that Al qaeda had one less safehaven. If you look at what's happened to the top 50 people in that group in 9.12.01, and their replacements, it's a pretty clear win. It's not even a functional terrorist group anymore. The best they can hope for right now is that some guy they've never met carries out an attack in their name so they can pretend that they are still functional / relevant.

At times, the US has spun this as a nation building effort. THAT 'mission' will likely never succeed, we agree there, but it was mostly a PR side effort anyway. I'm not sure anyone here really cares about that mission, or should. We're there to hunt our enemy, and we've done a very good job at it. The enemy has said as much themselves. A promotion in Al qaeda is essentially a death sentence...more so than any enemy the US has ever really had.

The problem here is expectations. People want to see a war end like WW2 ended. Not going to happen ever again. Well, not until big powers decide to give it another go.

Politicians screwed that pooch. Don't matter if they used muskets or laser guns. When the powers that be aren't committed to actually winning you will get the same results. As far as if it happened tomorrow? We would fuck that place up.

You saw how we ground Iraq to a halt in the gulf war right? We could do the same to old North Vietnam in short order.

Communication, radar, utilities, all gone in the blink of an eye.

Look over to the sand box and tell me we are doing any better. As far as I know we never lost a battle in Vietnam.  We lost our resolve to win at any cost after WWII and that is what it takes to win. It isn't technology it is who is willing to do what it takes at any cost.

Hmmm.. claymore trailcam drones...

Would it have helped? Sure tech always gives you an advantage. But all the toy's in the world won't help if you have inept leaders and poor battle plans.

The enemy would have adapted and they would have done the same thing they did then. Hide and fight on their own terms and then vanish. And in all reality the Chinese would have probably gotten involved at some point.

We could have won Vietnam with WWII tech, but we weren't in it to win it, so, big surprise, we lost it.

News flash, a "limited" war is just killing some people, getting some people killed, and blowing shit up, and some of your shit getting blown up, for nothing.

Worse if by technology, the North Vietnamese had sympathetic FB and Twitter and other social media platforms to plead their case to their fellow travelers in academia and the MSM.

The Vietnam war was won and lost on TV because the fourth estate was (is) a fifth column.

It was the era of three channels and PBS. And if Walter Crumbcake said it, it was the end of discussion. When you watched him, you were able to not only C BS, but hear it, too.
He was the archetypical libtard of his time.
After Tet, when we kicked names and took ass all over the VC, he came out, showed some carefully selected clips, and said, "See, we can't win!" That was the singular moment which meant it, in a totally self-fulfilling prophetic way, became unwinnable. There is never a time when you decide to quit that you cannot achieve it.
What are the chances you can lose, if you decide to? Can that ever be less than a 100% certainty?

He was a shilling POS.

Whats that matter when the people you're fighting for don't want or care for it?

correct we won Vietnam militarily we lost politically.

you can go 5000 years further in tech Johnson&Nixon were still ham stringing our military so badly it would not have ever mattered.

even in 1963 we could have destroyed Vietnam in a few minutes, but we didn't have the will.

Depends on who you ask and how you define winning.

If losing all of your indirect fire weapons, the head shed, CO, 1SG, ASP, commo bunker, but otherwise light casualties, while the enemy lost heavy casualties (on the distraction human wave assault you thought was the main effort) counts as winning, then we did a lot of winning.



If not destroying SAM sites or targeting critical nodes in the North due to ROE (only to lose record air crews and aircraft to those same weapons) counts as winning, then we won the crap out of that war.





The enemy considered that same battle a huge success because they took out critical personnel with the most experience, indirect fire assets, radios, your ASP, and now that combat outpost or FOB is dead in the water for a while.

There were 3 different Vietnam conflicts we fought, all with different leadership and visions:

1. Eisenhower-Kennedy advisor years providing military assistance to the South Vietnamese
2. Johnson years where hundreds of thousands of troops were sent to fight with their hands tied by ROE that seemed like Moscow wrote it for us
3. Nixon years where the gloves came off, but the ideological/information war from enemies within was lost on the heels of the Tet Offensive of '68 under Johnson's admin

If we had the National will to prosecute the war fully even then, things would have been a lot different, but we had one of the most corrupt Presidents in the WH, with no military background or care, running a clown shoes operation that seemed designed to maximize our own casualties, while pouring billions of resources into it.

With Gulf War technology even, command and control nodes in the North would have been repeatedly precision-targeted with 2000lb LGBs, Haiphong would have been decimated, cutting off any sea trade logistics capacity, and the air war would have seen a brutally unfair advantage in our favor.

SAM sites would have been targeted and eliminated as a priority mission profile, rather than allowed to sit and target our sorties like under Johnson (if we had the political will.)

But most of these developments we currently have evolved out of Vietnam.

Our fighter doctrine and design was heavily influenced by the threat of large numbers of cheap MiGs designed to close with us and take advantage of WVR realm, exploiting the focus of fighter air crews on BVR in heavy fighters like the F-4, or fast tactical nuke bombers like the F-105.

Our lessons learned from SAM and AAA shoot-downs were painful, but a main focus of survivability on future systems.



LGBs were introduced and developed during Vietnam with the PAVEWAY program.



We gained a decade of continuous carrier battle group operations, as well as TAC AIR, MAC, and SAC.



RED FLAG would not have been what it is today without our experience in Vietnam.

Our rotary wing culture went from rudimentary systems to large fleets of utility, heavy lift, attack, and light observation helicopters with an institutional knowledge base that seeded our dominance of military rotary wing aviation.

The main successful program I can think of that we have implemented since then that didn't have as much experience to gain from Vietnam is NTC, which is an armor and aviation-centric combined arms exercise out in the desert, which was a huge factor in us obliterating the Iraqi armored units in Desert Storm.

A great majority of the rest of our successes in DS are direct results of the lessons-learned in Vietnam.

More importantly, our role in global trade allows us to yield much better results with no losses on our part when dealing with Vietnam nowadays.

Mmmph.

Aren't we fighting something close to the Vietnam war now, against haji? How's that going?  We've been at war since 2001, let that sink in.

What military technology would it take to make the government we were trying to prop up not be hopelessly corrupt, incompetent, and unpopular?

Having the best technology and war fighting tactics don't make a difference when your elected officials won't let you use them.

Which would have put us with a major ally on the border with China.

FWIW, both the USAF WildWeasel mission aircraft (F-100 & -105) and EB-66 ( think of "BAT-21") , and the USN/USMC EA-6A Prowlers were operating in VN by 1965, providing those sorts of Electronic Countermeasures.

Without different leadership the result would be the same.

When the president's only goal is to avoid losing while he's in office, the war is lost before it begins.

The US DID have canister rounds for the 105 & 155 Howitzers for close in defense at point blank ranges.

Called "Beehive" rounds because of the large number of sharpened darts (Fletchettes) and the sound they made.

Indeed. I'm surprised more people don't know about all the technology and weaponry we fielded during that war.

Agree and Thanks for serving in the Nam.  My active duty was early 80's where many of those who fought there were still active, so I got to hear the stories first hand from those who experienced it.  It appeared to be a cluster of epic proportions and as an answer to the OP...my understanding is that if we had the same mindset it would not matter and the North would make fools of us still thanks to the politicians.

In the early 80s, we used the same 782 gear, SP-1s and C rats issued in Vietnam due to budget constraints even in the "Reagan age" and the ROE and politics were horrendously passive on our side.  Our battalion deployed to Rota Spain and sent a Det to Beirut when the Hezbollah bombed the barracks in Beirut,   While we were in Rota on our own US Naval base, we could not fly a single American flag!   What does that tell you about our passivity. .

Superior technology won't make all that much difference when there is so little support back home, and so much interference by politicians in how the war is waged.

The medical advances, and personal armor used today could make a big difference in how many troops survive wounding, but not so much in the outcome of the war itself.

Air Power is the USA specialty.   We built a huger fleet of Nuclear armed Jet Bombers, High-Speed Recon Aircraft, another fleet of jet Tankers to support mid-air refueling providing literally anywhere in the world distance capability and bases all over the world from England to North Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The problem LeMay had was there were not really "Strategic Targets" in North Vietnam to target.   At best Rail Bridges to link to China, The Port of Haiphong, a few electrical generating plants for the cities, and other than that arms and P.O.L. storage facilities to temporarily received then distribute the supplies North Vietnam received in huge quantities from her allies in the Communist world.

The North Vietnamese were not building their own MiG fighters or T-54 Tanks in a huge industrial factory like the Soviets would have built (Tank City), they were not even building their own small arms ammo or refining their own fuels.    So you didn't have "The Big World War II Targets" of eliminating the fuel or manufacturing capacity of a highly technical military by making "The Big Raid" with your air power (like to bomb Ploesti or Regensberg or Schweinfurt or the Ruhr - all of which were bloodbaths in the air for the US Airforce against the Luftwaffe)...   Modern Air Power is vastly more destructive (see Nuclear SAC above) but we were not in any way prepared to go Ghengis Khan and nuke the 5 largest cities in North Vietnam just to show we meant business and would kill everyone we needed to in order to "make peace".  And we go nuclear, what keeps the other side from doing the same.   The SAM-2 in the USSR were often fitted with nuclear warheads for use against US bombers.   Maybe some of those get "accidentally" shipped to North Vietnam and used against squadrons of Linebacker III B-52s or a Special Atom Demolition Munition (dufflebag nuke) goes to U-Dorn in Thailand or Saigon or Guam?  World War III?   Over Vietnam??

The North Vietnamese fought the hard slog mainly on foot, and with supplies either portered on bicycles or a large number of hard to find and destroy trucks under a shifting jungle trail that could be hacked out by an army of "engineers" with axes, shovels and maybe an occasional bulldozer.   They used humans where the American thing was to use technical machinery with the associates "strings" (fuel, parts, repairs) that goes with it.

The Vietnamese Strength was they were absolutely prepared to fight for 10-20-50 years if it took that long.   The USA Weakness is the opposite of that.  We lose interest soon, especially if people we know are being maimed and killed in a battle that doesn't seem to be directly related to our immediate safety & security.  We have at most a few years to kick ass & wrap it up, before we start moaning "Vietnam - we are in another quagmire again"...  Of course these days it is more likely to be "Iraq - Afghanistan we are in another no-win war".  We can kick ass on the battlefield, but we don't have the time or ability to reform bad governments from the ground up AND get tribes of uneducated poor people to suddenly adopt "Jeffersonian Democracy"...  The take out all the money and run, leaving us left fighting for them.

It wasn't technology that made us tuck tail and run.

If you would use that technology to devastate Washington DC, Berkeley Campus, the Democratic Convention and Woodstock instead of Hanoi, then yes.

Yep, it would be fought with the same politics as the 60s and 70s. "NO BLOOD FOR RICE MAN!"

Insert great laughter here

That is stooped.  Woodstock?  It was just a music festival!

EPA wouldn't let us defoliate entire forests

No draftees, I doubt in the current political climate that a single politician would even consider it

Politicians are what hurt us in Vietnam.

ROEs are a bit irrelevant when you up and leave the country.

We declared victory and left, and then a massive neighboring Army invaded and the local army, which we had built as a counterinsurgency force, was woefully unable to withstand it.

Sounds almost familiar.

Will our military still have one hand tied behind their backs.

Isn't that just the war in Afghanistan but with more trees?

We lost because of policy not technology.  BTW, we still use the same rifle and same bomber.

We would do much, much worse.

Instead of flying in helicopters we would be road bound with MRAPs and just getting blown up.  Higher troop counts would mean many more deaths.

we would have control over Saigon and little else.

the NVA and VC were a much more capable enemy than the Taliban in terrain much more favorable to the insurgent.  So imagine Afghanistan today, only 10 times worse.

Yup.

Meh, fixating on that was part of our problem in Iraq.

Secure the country first, better politics will follow.

Nobody gave two shits that South Korea was a corrupt dictatorship for decades after the war. Hell, Spain was let into NATO as a basket case.

Technology wasn't the problem. Doctrine was.

People are generally incapable of learning from history. If you could quantum leap back to the Vietnam War era with billions of dollars worth of today's war machines and volumes of books about the war...we'd still fuck it up.

Reading this thread, I can’t help but get the impression some people are just upset we didn’t randomly wipe out South Vietnamese villages,

No.  The USA Media would still cause us to lose but sooner.

Maybe not SV, but Linebacker II bombed the fuck out of Hanoi and worked very, very well.

I told the padre the truth, man: I like it here.

would the jungle,rivers, heat, humidity,fungus,parasites, Monsoons and mud be the same?

we would be hard pressed to find an area more conducive to COIN than Afghanistan, and we have been there for 17 fucking years and we are losing more and more ground every day.

You take the army of incompetent 105 GT score GOFOs we have now in Afghanistan and Tet would have been the end of the war, for SVN and the US.

Results would likely be the same.

NVGs would’ve helped reduce casualties considerably.

We didn’t go balls to the wall then because nobody wanted to fight China.

The Vietnamese are also really good fighters. They’d honed their skills versus the Japanese, then the French, then us. Not too many years later, the Chinese juggernaut decided to invade Vietnam and got a righteous beat down.

MACV/SOG and LRRP teams would have raped literal dicks off to the point that there would have been no dicks left to rape.