Not in the Korean War. And during the Afgan War no one attempted to attack Soviet forces in the USSR – it was enough to discourage them from sending forces south of that border.

This again proves Andrew Jackson right when Jackson set into American politics the “winner takes all system”. Once in office, you get rid of anything that even smacked of the former regime.

This can have problems in peace time, when you get rid of experienced people solely for allegiance or affiliation issues, but it is critical in warfare when you are more worried about internal sabotage than enemy actions. Or when internal sabotage can do far more damage than any enemy action.

On another note, there is no reason behind a war. The reasons for the war are written down and set in stone after the war is over.

There may be motivations for war or peace, but there are never any definite reasons for it until after the war is won or lost.

In the end, war is not really an Ivy League intellectual challenge. It is a thing of spirit, will, heart, and determination. Not a thing of bean counting and political scoring.

And the going will always get tough in a distant and lengthy war fought for poor reasons…

Fixed.

It was pretty clear then, and is abundantly clear now, that very few people in the country could know the real JFK; nor could we accurately assess
his effectiveness. Between his formidable spin machine, the adoring press and his pet historians it has been extremely hard to separate fact from fiction.

Of one thing we can be reasonably certain; just as there was no Camelot in Mediveal England there was assuredly no Camelot on the Potomac. But, legends die hard.

That was why the JCS wanted to cut the rail lines, mine Hai Phong harbor, blast the irrigation dams, and crater all the airport runways. To deny them resupply. You do know that Hai Phong was never closed during the war? There were French, German, Russian, and even American ships resupplying the North the entire time. Had we effectively made resupply very difficult (There could have been rudimentary supply by land from China, but it would not have been sufficient to sustain them.) and ruined the irrigation for the rice crops, the North Vietnamese would have had to reconsider their aims. Our goal was only to partition the country as had been done in Korea. We were willing to live with a free South and a Communist North. IMHO, it could have been achieved if Johnson had been bold and accepted the JCS recommendations.

Back when Johnson had the funds and the munitions, he still didn’t intend to use the requisite violence, probably due to Johnson’s belief, just like McClellan’s, that you could “make a deal’ with the North Vietnamese like you would any other politician.

This is a totally separate issue from when Congress cut off the logistics to the South Vietnamese and American armies.

Grant it all three, and it can eventually recover from any adversity, even the complete destruction of its field army.

That only applies to the Vietnamese, who actually “cared”. The only three things that determine objectively who wins and who loses, are will, resources, and logistics. America had the last two for most of the war, while the Vietnamese had the first one in abundance but was lacking in the last 2.

In such circumstances all you can do is try to hold the line until the attacker despairs of victory and gives up.

Trying to hold a line in the sand is what causes people to lose wars. Once an opponent has conceded that all he can do is defend at this “line”, then they are going down in the end. Regardless of whether they are France with their Maginot Line or Hitler defending Berlin.

And the US had more money.

None of that matters when the money isn’t going to get there, and the money won’t get there unless you can get not just the resources but the means to move those resources combined with the will to move those resources.

To continue the fight an army needs resupplies of three things: men, money, and munitions.

Vietnam outran the needs of any single army.

Jimmy, I don’t think that insufficient “real force”, that is, violence, was really the problem.

In the end, the causality chain is that once you refuse to attack beyond a certain point, you start to lose the will to fight because you have already admitted that you can’t win. Once the will is lost, congress starts to cut funds and logistics. Once the resources and the logistics of the South Vietnamese were disabled, their will to fight became lost as well.

So insufficient use of force against one’s enemies really is the lynchpin of the entire disaster called Vietnam. Once America stopped using violence because they no longer wanted to, and once Vietnam stopped using violence because they were no longer able to, the game was over.

Jimmy, I don’t think that insufficient “real force”, that is, violence, was really the problem. To continue the fight an army needs resupplies of three things: men, money, and munitions. Cut off any of those, and it will eventually die. Grant it all three, and it can eventually recover from any adversity, even the complete destruction of its field army.

The North Vietnamese Army’s men came from North Vietnam, which the US was not prepared to occupy, and the money and munitions came from the USSR and China, which the US certainly was not going to attack.

In such circumstances all you can do is try to hold the line until the attacker despairs of victory and gives up.

It is not impossible. If the US got to the point when all it had to do was throw equipment and the odd advisor to the South Vietnamese, it would simply be a question of who got tired of burning money first, America or Russia. And the US had more money.

But the Administration implicitly believed that it could quickly win the war simply by attacking the NVA, bombing the North etc. (To be fair, the North Vietnamese might have chosen to give up after this. But there was no way for the US to force them to.) Having pledged to do the impossible, it failed and naturally lost all credibility.

If you keep saying that you can see that the end of the tunnel is within reach, and keep being proven wrong, people will stop believing you, whatever propaganda your enemies use.

You must be right eventually, but by that time people will have long ago stopped listening.

That’s why it’s easy for them to ridicule Bush, LBJ, or anyone else that doesn’t meet their lofty impressions of what “smart” means.

I went into journalism with a background in hard science and math… and as a group they seem to revel in their ignorance of things that would make them “geeky.”

Looking ahead at personality, here’s what I told my wife this morning:

“Obama seems more palatable, because he wraps his socialism in a candy-coated shell of personal responsibility. Hillary wants to hold your nostrils and jam the spoon down your throat.”

I’m with you on the light footprint. At least, one has to entertain it as a possibility, rather than dismiss it as proof of one’s infallibility as a strategist. The more McCain harps on this, the more I worry about his ability to listen to anything that challenges his set ideas. We really need a quick thinker who can process new information and correct course.

I notice the same thinking with regard to global warming. Just yesterday, I read a Reuters report that Putin is preparing to clean up on carbon credits. I’m afraid of the way McCain has settled on cap and trade because I think all these economic incentives could be the next subprime disaster.

Nah. The “maverick” is too busy distorting his opponents stance on the issues.