The Cost of Losing the “Other War” in Vietnam

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, much of the discourse on why the United States lost the Second Indochina War has focused on the strategy employed by American forces. This discourse has often served to divide American public opinion on the war, but also marks an even greater divide between American and Vietnamese students of the war. For many Americans and chiefly those Vietnamese who championed the cause of the Republic of Vietnam, defeat came as a result of the failure of the United States to correctly identify what kind of war they were fighting, the Clausewitzian prerequisite for all successful military doctrine, let alone a land war in Asia. These students of the war look to its political dimensions as an outside variable that worked to inhibit battlefield success. Some go so far as to decry the fact that, towards the close of the war, when they claim conditions“in country”turned in America’s favor, war-weariness and a lack of political will in the United States brought an end to the conflict just when the war held the greatest promise for victory. Such postmortems on the war are viewed with considerable skepticism by most of those Americans who regard the war for the defense of the Republic of Vietnam as unnecessary or unwinnable under the circumstances that governed American intervention. Sharing their skepticism are many Vietnamese on the winning side. They fail to see how any victory would have emerged from a strategy more attuned to the war Hanoi and the Viet Cong were waging, for it was designed, at least in part, to alter the nature of the war to best frustrate the chosen strategy of their much stronger opponent.