Italian guy, there's no harm in disagreement. If everyone agreed on everything in this forum then there would be no reason to be here because there wouldn't be anything to learn!

When we talk about "millitarily" you all seem to be focused on bombs and bullets but what I am saying is that there is much more to war than that and that if you ignore them you are doomed to failure.

I think you guys are understanding my position here but let me try and clarify it just a little more. In the middle ages you're charged with defending a castle from attackers. You man the ramparts and arm the archers. But at night a spy flings open the gates and lets the enemy in. Did you suffer a millitary defeat? I say yes because espionoge is a facet of warfare. A very similar thing happened in Vietnam. To answer godofthunder's question, those men on the ramparts did not fail in their duty but the end result was defeat.

Thank you for your clarification. I believe WD's position is clear now.

No WD you still don't get it. To use your silly castle analogy, it would be more like being sent to defend your friend's castle against his enemies and their friends. You defeat the enemy every time he tries to take the castle. At some point the folks back home are convinced that they want you to come home despite your friend's situation so after the enemiy agrees to stop fighting with your friend, you go home. A few years later, your friend loses his castle to his enemy and thier friends. The castle was lost, did you lose it? That my young friend is the question.

Originally Posted by Whispering Death

Italian guy, there's no harm in disagreement. If everyone agreed on everything in this forum then there would be no reason to be here because there wouldn't be anything to learn!

When we talk about "millitarily" you all seem to be focused on bombs and bullets but what I am saying is that there is much more to war than that and that if you ignore them you are doomed to failure.

I think you guys are understanding my position here but let me try and clarify it just a little more. In the middle ages you're charged with defending a castle from attackers. You man the ramparts and arm the archers. But at night a spy flings open the gates and lets the enemy in. Did you suffer a millitary defeat? I say yes because espionoge is a facet of warfare. A very similar thing happened in Vietnam. To answer godofthunder's question, those men on the ramparts did not fail in their duty but the end result was defeat.

Right, essesntially your saying that the original quesiton is irrelevant, more or less. To sum up, and correct me if I'm understanding you correctly WD, "You can't separate a Military overseas venture from non-Military domestic affairs. Failure on one front is failure by both." So somebody please add the "Not Applicable" option to the vote then, since your answer would be neither "yes" or "no".

While the NVA and VC used "unconventional warfare",we countered that with our SF org's.

Originally Posted by godofthunder9010

Right, essesntially your saying that the original quesiton is irrelevant, more or less. To sum up, and correct me if I'm understanding you correctly WD, "You can't separate a Military overseas venture from non-Military domestic affairs. Failure on one front is failure by both." So somebody please add the "Not Applicable" option to the vote then, since your answer would be neither "yes" or "no".

I actually said that in the first response to this thread which ignighted this whole thing. You can go back and re-read it if you want, I said that my answer to both questions is "yes".

And D-Top the castle analogy is very limmited just to try and illustrate a point. But at the point where you have 500,000 of your soldiers invested in a conflict it becomes your war IMHO. When you have 3 times the ammount of men currently in Iraq+Afghanistan combined that makes you committed to the conflict. Come on now, are you going to argue that America didn't "win" against Germany in WW2 just because we where helping an ally?

I remember the situation like this, an old Viet Vet told me a while ago one day.

"The Vietnamese pulled out because they couldn't keep on fighting,
And the Yanks pulled out because their politicans were too gutless to keep on going.
And when the Yanks left, the North Vietnamese came in again."

Take it or leave it, thats how it was.

BTW: Those were his actual words. I was told by my dad it's offensive to call a "southerner", a "yankie"

Originally Posted by Bory

BTW: Those were his actual words. I was told by my dad it's offensive to call a "southerner", a "yankie"

Well, comming from someone half-way across the world I guess it's okay to call all Americans "yanks", we still call Britts "Limeys" after all

But, yeah, I dare you to walk up to any true Texan and call him personally a yankee to his face We use the world as a derogatory term to describe all that's wrong with the North East part of this country!

War is politics taken to its extreme according to Von Clausewitz, yet it is entirely logical to separate military action from political action. You will never read an AAR (After Action Review) which has ANYTHING pertaining to politics contained therein. Combat might occur because of political clashes but the action itself has sweet all to do with politics. It is violence of action and there is nothing political about the realities of an honest to hades battlefield. Where "the metal meets the meat" American soldiers absoinglutely did NOT lose in Vietnam.

A political or global geo-political loss does not a military loss make.

The Vietnam War was a battle in the Cold War.
We didn't lose the Cold War, so how could we have lost
in Vietnam.