Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger View Post
'Gotta disagree with you there. The US military was never defeated on the battlefield in South Vietnam, despite all sorts of advantages given the North Vietnamese via Johnson, ill-suited strategy and tactics, and some pretty poor leadership, and would have had very few troubles taking Hanoi. In fact, IIRC, it was 2 years after the vast majority of US forces had left that the NVA took the South.

As you indicated, Vietnam was a terrible example of politicians creating an atmosphere of inevitable failure. They thought that Ho Chi Men would be comfortable with a Korea-like situation, but it should have been clearly obvious after a year or three that he would have to be clearly defeated or the US should no longer invest their containment resources in Vietnam. The legacy of that war led Kennedy and later Johnson to embrace the idea of "limited war" and create and a worst-case scenario where the communist forces were allowed half the nation to plan and train for all of their (failed) assaults, not to mention resupply the VietCong. Worse, by the time Nixon - who would have had no qualms about trouncing the NVA in NV and letting China sort them out - was elected, there was no public will left to do so.
Winning individual battles does not mean you've won on the battlefield. At the end of the war we held no territory, every field where every battle had been fought was surrendered to the enemy. There can be no better standard for defeat. Don't you think every army departing their latest defeat said to themselves 'Yeah, but we could have won...'

All of that said, I don't question that we had the military capacity to win the war. To be blunt a single nuclear weapon would have ended effective resistance immediately. For all of that, we lacked the will and most especially the leadership to use the power we possessed, and because of that lack we were, in fact, defeated on the battlefield. Even if you argue that it was never our goal to hold any battlefields I don't see any of our other goals that were effectively accomplished.

In the Phillipines campaign the will of that generation of Americans is clearly on display. Doing the 'right' thing came a logical second to doing whatever led to victory. IMHO communications plays the largest role in the changes that our military forays have undergone since those days. The fact that politicians (And many of our top military officials are now politicians) can communicate with commanders in the field on a day to day and even moment to moment basis has forever altered the nature of military intervention.

To invite further controversy let me also say that our defeat in Iraq is a function of that same problem.