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Yeah, that's how every war is lost. A war is won when the other side is no longer willing and able to take up arms against you, to achieve victory, you can remove their ability to take up arms (killing or imprisoning, for example), but the bulk of warfare is about removing the enemy's willingness to keep fighting.
Like, if you occupy an enemy trench, chances are you didn't kill everyone in the trench, you just removed the enemy's willingness to keep holding that position, convincing them to retreat or surrender. Virtually every war that has ever been lost in history has been "lost because of morale."
Putting "lost" in quotes regarding Vietnam is absolutely fucking insane. "Kill death ratios" don't matter, this isn't fucking Call of Duty. Murdering all those civilians helped convince the Vietnamese that there was no future for them if they lost or surrendered, it put their backs against the wall and ensured that breaking their willingness to fight was virtually impossible. If the US deployed nukes, then it would become even more clear that there was no future for them as a colony, and the US would have to exterminate the entire country. And if they tried to exterminate the entire country with nukes (not that they were at all restrained as it was), they would have faced even more backlash, domestically and internationally, which, guess what, are also valid theaters of war.
I stg the hoops people will jump through to maintain this chauvinism and be like "America never loses" is absolutely insane. People have such ridiculous brainworms over Vietnam. You lost. No quotes, you just lost. Get over it.
Kill death ratios absolutely matter… you had one country that was essentially unphased economically, manpower wise, and their territory was untouched and another that lost a sizable portion of their male population, had their citizens with long term genetic injuries, and a bunch of their land made unusable.
The NVA got nothing from the United states and their long term goal of spreading communism failed.
The way a war is won is by achieving your military goals the NVA was unable to defeat the U.S. military. In a Pyrrhic victory one side wins at a great expense, that’s still not what happened
the U.S. was up by 10 and took their ball and went home because the other team wanted to keep playing late into the night
The U.S. isn’t the good guy that people want to win it’s acknowledging that the professional sports team beat a group of 15 year olds. Nobody is bragging how great the U.S. is, if anything it’s more evidence for how much of a dick the U.S. was (and still is)
What utter nonsense.
The NVA got the entire territory of Vietnam from the US, they won the freedom of their people, which is the whole thing they were fighting for. The idea that they wanted to militarily expand and take over the world was always just American propaganda, like every conflict ever, they needed to evoke the Hitler comparison and pretend that "if we don't fight them now, they'll keep expanding until we have to fight them." They've said this about virtually everyone they've fought or opposed since WWII and it's basically never been true.
Vietnam has done, and is still doing much better than they would have if they had surrendered and remained a colony.
I don't even know how it's possible to reason with someone who thinks war operates on some kind of point based-system like a fucking video game. Jesus Christ. How are Americans still like this over Vietnam? Will people ever be normal about it?
They weren’t an American colony they had won their independence in 1945. The U.S. vs north Vietnamese conflict ended with the Vietnamese getting nothing, after the U.S. left the north Vietnamese were able to defeat the South Vietnamese but South Vietnam wasn’t owned by America…
I’m not sure where you learned anything about world history but you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened
From Vietnam being a colony To any concern about Vietnam taking over the world
You do realize video games use things that exist in the real world right? Like if I talk about how important goals are in soccer you do know that is because that’s how soccer works and it’s not just because that’s how you win in fifa?
South Vietnam was an American puppet regime. The puppet regime was entirely dependent on the US military and the leaders were picked by the US and ousted whenever they did something the US didn't like. You are plainly speaking in bad faith and attempting to use technicalities to avoid facing the truth of the US defeat. "Mhm, see, technically, Japan didn't lose that territory because Manchuko was an independent blah blah blah." It's an obviously stupid line if you apply it in any other context, but your chauvinism blinds you. Just like the line about "We only 'lost' because of morale" or the line about kill death ratios mattering, apply it anywhere but Vietnam and you'll see how fucking stupid it is.
Nazi Germany killed a hell of a lot of Russians in WWII. I don't actually know if they killed more than they lost, I believe so but I'd have to check. Does that mean Nazi Germany won WWII? Does that mean I don't know who won WWII, because I don't know the KDRs? Do you see how ridiculous it is to say that? And yet, that's exactly what you're saying about Vietnam!
You literally just said they "failed in their goal to spread communism." As in, to spread communism beyond their borders. As in, Domino Theory. As in, the idea that the communists fighting in Vietnam were aiming to take over the world and turn it communist. You're straight up contradicting yourself.
Christ Jesus in heaven.