this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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Vietnam got ~~hands~~ smarts.
They’ve successfully defeated the most advanced militaries in the world, repeatedly over decades, primarily using booby traps. Their strength is their ingenuity.
The real takeaway is that war is a matter of motivation. If you're fighting people who don't want to be subjugated, and you're threatening subjugation, the chances of you being as determined as them to keep up the fight is very slim.
I remember in the Ken Burns documentary, learning that the US wasn’t really taking and holding land in Vietnam. They’d take a hill one day, only to pull back and give it up a few days later.
WWI No Man's Land in France and elsewhere.
Sometimes. Advanced technology paved the way for many empires, the Mongols, the Greeks, the Romans, the British, etc.
Vietnam’s technology may not have been advanced, but it, coupled with the terrain, was very effective at mitigating some of the technological advantages given to their opponents.
To your point, most currently practiced martial arts were created out of necessity to defend one’s home. Many martial arts began by using fishing or farming tools as weapons due to accessibility. Sometimes a new technique had to be created to survive, like how Koreans didn’t have horses, so they created Taekwondo as a way to kick a person off of a horse.
So yes, people fight harder in defense than in attack, but that alone isn’t enough. It’s exactly why Ukraine needs all of the munitions support they can get.
Unless the technological disparity is so great that it allows a force to utterly and literally exterminate the opposition, it comes down to motivation. In defense or attack - defense is just generally more motivating to a population.