Explanation: In the past 70 years, Vietnam has fought France, the US, the PRC, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam won each time.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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Vietnam became the South-East equivalent of invading Russia in Winter.
Edit: necessary reaction gif
“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.” -Ho Chi Minh
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.
Well played, Vietnam.
For the US, its was due to lack of public support. If they didn't do conscription (cuz people hate conscription, so that was bad PR), and had better propaganda to get more public support (and thus get enough people to voluntarily join the military to make up for the loss from lack of conscription), they might have won (emphesis on the "might"), although a huge number of US troops would've died.
I mean, the US did kinda saved South Korea, they could've done the same about Vietnam if they just had the same support.
South Korea also had a semi-functional government with some popular support. If we had taken North Vietnam the way we took most of North Korea before the PRC intervened, it would have resulted in an extension of the attrition-based warfare that characterized the Vietnam War, not the relative near-victory of the Korean War.