Attack on Marine at Florida Theater

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**youbedead**

Kanluwen wrote:
youbedead wrote:
Either you don't understand the strategy employed by the N Vietnamese or you think that the only battles that count are massed exchanges of force, of course they lost a pitched battle with u.s. forces. That is why they resorted to the sneak attacks and ambushes that plagued U.S. forces.

First off, if you're going to try to talk down to someone, have your facts in order.

If you're going to refer to the North Vietnamese and their "strategies", then you should also refer to things correctly.

The NVA almost never engaged in "sneak attacks and ambushes". The NVA took a very Soviet doctrine to their warfare, and threw bodies at the problem.
The sneak attacks were the province of the Viet Cong, which were a very broad mixture of North and South Vietnamese civilians who were trained up in guerilla warfare. They had no real role in the greater scheme of things, outside of those "sneak attacks and ambushes" and serving as an informant/insurgency cadre for the NVA.

Just because an enemy doesn't win in large scale battles doesn't mean they still can't win the war, as they plainly demonstrated.

Did I say anything about "they didn't win in large scale battles, so they can't win the war"?
No. I didn't, so stop trying to put words in my mouth.
The NVA and the VC lost a large amount of men and material almost anytime they launched large scale operations aimed at assaulting and occupying parts of the South when the US forces were still on the ground.
But more often than not their goals were not actually to "win" those operations, they were simply to take and hold key areas that would grant them the most publicity and favorable public opinion or have some kind of profound effect on the morale of their enemies, like the capture of the US Embassy in Saigon during the Tet Offensive or the assault on the fortress city of Hue.

What i mean by overwhelming force is what the modern U.S. military has adopted, hit the enemy hard at the very onset of the war and use as much force as possible i.e. iraq. We learned this from Vietnam, had we attacked the north with superior force from the get go we could have made it all the way to Hanoi.

We did attack the North with "superior force". 'Operation: Rolling Thunder', for example, was estimated to have caused more casualties than we suffered in the entire Vietnam War and deal millions of dollars of damage to the already weak infrastructure in the North.
However, we never sustained the attack, due to popular opinion pressuring the politicians in overall command to take a velvet gloved approach anytime they might be caught fething up.

Thank you for clarifying your position a bit more, I agree with you entirely. Unfortunately the vast majority of people don't understand even the basic facts about the Vietnam war, wich leads to drastic oversimplification of complicated situations. When i said overwhelming and superior force i did mean a sustained air and ground assault, had we actually pursued the destruction of the north we could have easily won. I also didn't say that their goal was to win the battles, they were meant to demoralize the enemy, thats how asymmetric warfare is fought you remove the will of the occupying force and you win. That was their grand strategy, like i said it was right out of sun ztu's playbook.(also sorry for mistakenly using the word tactics, it should have been strategy). Thought if we want to get really technical it was actually the viet nim as the never actually was a force called the viet cong, and they were primarly made of N vietnamese regulars that infiltrated the south.

**Amaya**

Well your point makes a lot more sense now.

**youbedead**

Amaya wrote:Well your point makes a lot more sense now.

Good we can all agree, now lets drink to the new year

**Ahtman**

Amaya wrote:You get briefed about battle butt buddies at MCT and AIT Kermit. After that, people don't really give a feth.

Nice deflection. You didn't address any question actually asked.

**dogma**

Amaya wrote:
FYI Kermit, there are a lot of minor attacks against military members, mainly in the form of bar fights. There's a reason why you're told to take a battle buddy with you everywhere.

So, what you're saying is that the military considers the maturity of its average enlisted man to be roughly equivalent to that of someone in grade school?

Are you sure these "attacks" aren't merely fights that started because two men in their early twenties were drinking?

**Monster Rain**

dogma wrote:So, what you're saying is that the military considers the maturity of its average enlisted man to be roughly equivalent to that of someone in grade school?

Having been on a couple of deployments I would say that this is a true statement.

**Amaya**

Monster Rain wrote:
dogma wrote:So, what you're saying is that the military considers the maturity of its average enlisted man to be roughly equivalent to that of someone in grade school?

Having been on a couple of deployments I would say that this is a true statement.

Pretty much.