alt Hacker News> Not your fault, many people think this way post-WWII as they have come to see this conflict as a template for what “real” war looks like.
Yeah I certainly see it that way. I think saying the US got "defeated" by Vietnam drops some nuance.
WWII proves the US is perfectly willing to suffer at least 5x the casualties of Vietnam in order to achieve their objectives. They probably just didn't want to commit to that sort of cost and pulled out instead. Feels like a different failure mode compared to going all out and getting routed.
“They didn’t want to” is hiding some of the complexity behind it. Vietnam had turned into a political crisis at home; there were widespread protests and lots of people openly dodging the draft. Grunts would sometimes “frag” commanders who pushed them into overly risky missions. Running up the casualties would have created a real risk of a violent revolt at home and mutiny among the soldiers. The US as a society was likely incapable of winning the war, so it turned into a defeat.
There may have been a window earlier on when greater commitment could have won the war or frozen the conflict, via invasion of North Vietnam, but not once the public turned against it. But this came with a big risk of direct intervention from China or the Soviet Union, as happened in Korea. In Korea, Chinese intervention led to a stalemate.