Why did the United States lose the Viet Nam war?
The United States neither lost nor won the Vietnam War. Here are some facts: The US Armed Forces won 27 battles total whereas the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong won a mere 15 battles throughout the course of the war. The US invasion of Cambodia was a success. The Americans killed more Vietnamese than the Vietnamese killed Americans. Of this, 58,000 Americans died whereas 1.1 million North Vietnamese were slaughtered. Technically, the USA did not lose the Vietnam War from a military stand point. They did quite well actually. However, the war was lost in a political sense due to early American withdrawal, therefore leaving the war to the South Vietnamese who could not repel the North Vietnamese invasion. Simply put, the Republic of Vietnam did not want to defend and fight for their country after the USA left in 1973. Hence the nail was hammered into the coffin on April 30, 1975 in what is known as the Fall of Saigon. We can also blame the media such as NBC, ABC, and CBS for being traitors an
Several reasons: The NVA did not have to define victory as defeating the United States. They merely had to outlast us and wear us down. (By the way, that was also General Washington’s strategy against the British) The U.S. did not have a clear definition of victory. Simply containing communism implies never ending military operations. Further, like in the previous Korean war, the U.S. feared Soviet retaliation were we to escalate the war. Politicians also limited military actions to avoid accusations of “acts of war” since we never “declared war” on Vietnam. Johnson regretted never bombing Hanoi, and Nixon later admitted he should have done it years earlier. U.S. politicians were more concerned with how their decisions would be received by the American public and foriegn governments than how to acheive victory. In a related matter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not advise the Commander In Chief with effective military plans, but with carefully weighed operations that carried calculated
