Vietnam War Failure

The Vietnam War was the first war that the United States definitively lost. This essay will focus on the failures of the United States to win the Vietnam War, despite having overwhelming military superiority over the North Vietnamese. To do this it is important to understand the origins and the events leading to the war, and how those events eventually escalated. Using this information, the essay will consider the causes of the failure of the United States in Vietnam, including disparity in the goals and objectives of each side, erroneous assumptions about America’s ability to translate military superiority into victory, miscalculations about the commitment and tactics of the North Vietnamese and a complete misunderstanding of the ability of

The previous grand-scale of international wars proved that conventional military strategy relied upon power to establish superiority and create an assumption of inevitable victory (Arreguín-Toft, 2001, p. 94). However the dynamics of the Vietnam War were completely different. Asymmetric conflicts have particular dynamics and cannot be fought in conventional ways. Ivan Arreguin-Toft argues that the best way to predict the outcome of an asymmetric conflict is to compare strategies of each group apart of the war (2001, p. 95). In the case of Vietnam superior conventional military force does not guarantee victory, but in the case of Vietnam it can also be seen as counter-productive (1975, p. 177). The escalation of commitment under Lyndon Johnson’s administration shows a misunderstanding of how the type of weaponry and tactics they thought would be useful in this war actually hindered them. When Johnson was elected President at the end of 1963, he called for a gradual escalation of involvement into Vietnam through conventional means. The Gulf of Tokin incident led to the commitment of the United States’ conventional forces and troops. After there was an attack of a United States’ warship allegedly by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, Johnson asked congress to take all necessary measures to repel armed attack in Vietnam through the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (Martel, 1992, pp. 36-37). Authority was given by congress leading to open ground and counter insurgent warfare against North Vietnam with the first combat troops arriving in January 1965 (Card & Lemieux, 2000, p. 99). At the peak of the war, the number of United States troops in Vietnam reached half a million in 1968, with the induction and conscription rate peaking at 42 thousand per month in spring of 1968 (Card & Lemieux, 2000, p. 99). The large number of people being