Could The U.S. Have Won The Vietnam Conflict And What Does This Tell Us About Current And Future Wars?

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By Ken Larson

Vietnam was not a declared war. It was a setup by the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). It was an incursion; developed by the MIC and the “Best and the Brightest” in the Pentagon, it cost money, treasure and lives while making billions for corporations.

Recent events involving war “Interventions” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine demonstrate the incredibly out of  control nature of military industrial complexes in advanced countries, their danger, their folly and their contributions to the largest national  debts ever to grace the face of the earth.

"WIKIPEDIA"

"David Halberstam's book offers a great deal of detail on how the decisions were made in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that led to the war, focusing on a period from 1960 to   1965 but also covering earlier and later years up to the publication year of the book.

Many influential factors are examined in the book:

•   " The Democratic party was still haunted by claims that it had 'lost   China' to Communists, and it did not want to be said to have lost Vietnam also
•    The McCarthy era had rid the government of experts in Vietnam and surrounding Far-East countries
•    Early studies called for close to a million U.S. troops to   completely defeat the Viet Cong, but it would be impossible to convince   Congress or the U.S. public to deploy that many soldiers
•    Declarations of war and excessive shows of force, including bombing   too close to China or too many U.S. troops, might have triggered the   entry of Chinese ground forces into the war, as well as greater Soviet   involvement, which might repair the growing Sino-Soviet rift.
•    The American military and generals were not prepared for protracted guerilla warfare.
•    Some war games showed that a gradual escalation by the United States   could be evenly matched by North Vietnam: Every year, 200,000 North   Vietnamese came of draft age and potentially could be sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to replace any losses against the U.S.: the U.S. would be 'fighting the birthrate'
•    Any show of force by the U.S. in the form of bombing or ground   forces would signal the U.S. interest in defending South Vietnam and   therefore cause the U.S. greater shame if they were to withdraw
•    President Johnson's belief that too much attention given to the war effort would jeopardize his Great Society domestic programs
•    The effects of strategic bombing:   Most people wrongly believed that North Vietnam prized its industrial   base so much it would not risk its destruction by U.S. air power and   would negotiate peace after experiencing some limited bombing. Others   saw that, even in World War II, strategic bombing united the victim population against the aggressor and did little to hinder industrial output.
•    The Domino Theory rationales are mentioned as simplistic.
•    After placing a few thousand Americans in harm's way, it became   politically easier to send hundreds of thousands over with the promise   that, with enough numbers, they could protect themselves and that to   abandon Vietnam now would mean the earlier investment in money and blood   would be thrown away.
The book shows that the gradual escalation initially allowed the Johnson Administration to avoid negative publicity and criticism from   Congress and avoid a direct war against the Chinese, but it also lessened the likelihood of either victory or withdrawal"

The Best And The Brightest

THE PAST

A quote many years ago from Major-General Smedley D. Butler: Common Sense (November 1935)

" I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force---the Marine Corps. I have served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers, In short I was a racketeer for capitalism

Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place to live for the National City Bank boys to collect   revenues in…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking   house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican   Republic for American Sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras   "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in1927 I helped   see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years  I  had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents. War Is A Racket"

VIETNAM WAR - THE COSTLIEST TO DATE

It's been 5 decades since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War, and yet payments for the conflict are still rising.

Now above $22 billion annually, Vietnam compensation costs are roughly twice the size of the FBI's annual budget. And while many disabled  vets have been compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds, other ailments are positioning the war to have large costs even after veterans die.

Based on an  uncertain  link to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam,  federal  officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that  qualifies  for cash compensation — and it is now the most compensated  ailment for  Vietnam vets.

The VA also recently included heart disease among  the Vietnam medical problems that qualify, and the agency  is seeing  thousands of new claims for that condition.

THE PRESENT

If  history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the  Iraq  and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and  their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated  Press analysis of federal payment records found that the  government is  still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148  years after the conflict ended.

At the anniversary of  the start of the Iraq War, more than $40 billion a  year is going to  compensate veterans and survivors from the  Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the  Vietnam War, the two Iraq  campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And  those costs are rising  rapidly.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war's long-lasting financial toll.

"When we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about   the cost," said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII veteran father's disability benefits helped feed their family.

With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of   improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of disability payments are set to rise much higher.

THE IRAQ WARS AND AFGHANISTAN

So  far, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf conflict in the early 1990s are costing about $12 billion a year to compensate those who have left military service or family members of those who have  died.

Those post-service compensation costs have totaled  more than $50 billion since 2003, not including expenses of medical  care and  other benefits provided to veterans, and are poised to grow  for many  years to come.

The new veterans are filing for disabilities at  historic rates, with about 45 percent of those from  Iraq and Afghanistan seeking compensation for injuries. Many are  seeking compensation for a  variety of ailments at once.

Experts see a variety of factors  driving that surge, including a bad economy that's led more jobless  veterans to seek the financial benefits they've  earned, troops who  survive wounds of war, and more awareness about  head trauma and mental  health.

THE FUTURE

Recent events involving US war "Interventions" in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine and the incredibly out of  control nature of the Military Industrial Complexes in the major advanced countries have demonstrated their danger, their folly and their contribution to the largest national  debts ever to grace the face of the earth.

Alternatives to war in terms of scientific advancement not only are required, but are in progress. The war makers are broke and operating on world credit subject to world approval.

The Real Solution

Releasing Countries From The Humanitarian And Economic Prisons Of Warfare

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The same, multi-national collaborative negotiation used to free 24 prisoners in Russia can be utilized to prevent and resolve wars.

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I have learned a great deal in two military combat tours, 36 years in the weapons systems business and 17 years as a national and international volunteer counselor to small business.

The most important lesson has been that someone different than I may not have the same value system I possess, but by learning about them I will be able to make distinctions between my values and theirs. 

That learning process permits me to consider accepting the differences between us, communicate with them and move forward on constructive objectives.

When governments and weapons makers treasure the economic windfalls in collective military industrial technology while refusing to negotiate, then political and military values on both sides of a world conflict collide.

Soldiers and civilians then die and economies endure massive debt or risk collapse while other world powers are forced to take sides.

All wars eventually result in negotiated settlements. Avoiding them by learning and negotiation in the first place is the most effective war weapon and by far the least costly in materials, debt and lives. 

A look over our shoulders at our recent warfare is useful when viewing our future while making prudent decisions regarding financial and defense security. Every citizen from the individual voter to the politician must consider the risks and the opportunities to avoid the risks of war.  

Effective negotiation must involve learning the other party’s values, not simply the perceived threat they represent to us because we do not know them.

From the neighborhood to the boardroom, from the Statehouse to the Congress and the White House, we would do well to learn more about those different from us before we fight.

The way forward lies in developing a mutual understanding of our respective values and cultures in lieu of fighting wars by using diplomacy and negotiation to save lives and economies.

Nations are evolving technological tools for communication at a startling pace. Our diplomacy, and negotiation must keep pace by using those tools with communicative, knowledgeable leadership to keep the peace.

What Can We Learn From People Who Are Different From Us?

How the Pentagon Became Walmart

“FOREIGN POLICY”  By Rosa Brooks

“Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military.

Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.

Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves: As we face novel security threats from novel quarters — emanating from nonstate terrorist networks, from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.

Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military.

More is at stake than most of us realize. Recall Shakespeare’s Henry V:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage… 

In war, we expect warriors to act in ways that would be immoral and illegal in peacetime. But when the boundaries around war and the military expand and blur, we lose our ability to determine which actions should be praised and which should be condemned.

For precisely this reason, humans have sought throughout history to draw sharp lines between war and peace — and between the role of the warrior and the role of the civilian. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies maintained that wars should be formally declared, take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations. In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, from war drums and war sorcery to war paint and complex initiation rites for warriors.

Like a thousand other human tribes before us, we modern Americans also engage in elaborate rituals to distinguish between warriors and civilians: Our soldiers shear off their hair, display special symbols on their chests, engage in carefully choreographed drill ceremonies, and name their weapons for fearsome spirits and totem animals (the Hornet, the Black Hawk, the Reaper). And despite the changes ushered in by the 9/11 attacks, most of us view war as a distinct and separate sphere, one that shouldn’t intrude into our everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games. Likewise, we relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we simultaneously lionize and ignore. War, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs and the military an institution that can be easily, if tautologically, defined by its specialized, war-related functions.

But in a world rife with transnational terrorist networks, cyberwarriors, and disruptive nonstate actors, this is no longer true. Our traditional categories — war and peace, military and civilian — are becoming almost useless.

In a cyberwar or a war on terrorism, there can be no boundaries in time or space: We can’t point to the battlefield on a map or articulate circumstances in which such a war might end. We’re no longer sure what counts as a weapon, either: A hijacked passenger plane? A line of computer code? We can’t even define the enemy: Though the United States has been dropping bombs in Syria for almost two years, for instance, no one seems sure if our enemy is a terrorist organization, an insurgent group, a loose-knit collection of individuals, a Russian or Iranian proxy army, or perhaps just chaos itself.

We’ve also lost any coherent basis for distinguishing between combatants and civilians: Is a Chinese hacker a combatant? What about a financier for Somalia’s al-Shabab, or a Pakistani teen who shares extremist propaganda on Facebook, or a Russian engineer paid by the Islamic State to maintain captured Syrian oil fields?

When there’s a war, the law of war applies, and states and their agents have great latitude in using lethal force and other forms of coercion. Peacetime law is the opposite, emphasizing individual rights, due process, and accountability.

When we lose the ability to draw clear, consistent distinctions between war and not-war, we lose any principled basis for making the most vital decisions a democracy can make: Which matters, if any, should be beyond the scope of judicial review? When can a government have “secret laws”? When can the state monitor its citizens’ phone calls and email? Who can be imprisoned and with what degree, if any, of due process? Where, when, and against whom can lethal force be used? Should we consider U.S. drone strikes in Yemen or Libya the lawful wartime targeting of enemy combatants or nothing more than simple murder?

When we heedlessly expand what we label “war,” we also lose our ability to make sound decisions about which tasks we should assign to the military and which should be left to civilians.

Today, American military personnel operate in nearly every country on Earth — and do nearly every job on the planet. They launch raids and agricultural reform projects, plan airstrikes and small-business development initiatives, train parliamentarians and produce TV soap operas. They patrol for pirates, vaccinate cows, monitor global email communications, and design programs to prevent human trafficking.

Many years ago, when I was in law school, I applied for a management consulting job at McKinsey & Co. During one of the interviews, I was given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”

“Roll over and die,” I said immediately.

The interviewer’s pursed lips suggested that this was the wrong answer, and no doubt a plucky mom-and-pop operation wouldn’t go down without a fight: They’d look for a niche, appeal to neighborhood sentiment, or maybe get artisanal and start serving hand-roasted chicory soy lattes. But we all know the odds would be against them: When Walmart shows up, the writing is on the wall.

Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small mom-and-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign-policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever-more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform as the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.

It’s fashionable to despise Walmart — for its cheap, tawdry goods, for its sheer vastness and mindless ubiquity, and for the human pain we suspect lies at the heart of the enterprise. Most of the time, we prefer not to see it and use zoning laws to exile its big-box stores to the commercial hinterlands away from the center of town. But as much as we resent Walmart, most of us would be hard-pressed to live without it.

As the U.S. military struggles to define its role and mission, it evokes similarly contradictory emotions in the civilian population. Civilian government officials want a military that costs less but provides more, a military that stays deferentially out of strategy discussions but remains eternally available to ride to the rescue. We want a military that will prosecute our ever-expanding wars but never ask us to face the difficult moral and legal questions created by the eroding boundaries between war and peace.

We want a military that can solve every global problem but is content to remain safely quarantined on isolated bases, separated from the rest of us by barbed wire fences, anachronistic rituals, and acres of cultural misunderstanding. Indeed, even as the boundaries around war have blurred and the military’s activities have expanded, the U.S. military itself — as a human institution — has grown more and more sharply delineated from the broader society it is charged with protecting, leaving fewer and fewer civilians with the knowledge or confidence to raise questions about how we define war or how the military operates.

It’s not too late to change all this.

No divine power proclaimed that calling something “war” should free us from the constraints of morality or common sense or that only certain tasks should be the proper province of those wearing uniforms. We came up with the concepts, definitions, laws, and institutions that now trap and confound us — and they’re no more eternal than the rituals and categories used by any of the human tribes that have gone before us.

We don’t have to accept a world full of boundary-less wars that can never end, in which the military has lost any coherent sense of purpose or limits. If the moral and legal ambiguity of U.S.-targeted killings bothers us, or we worry about government secrecy or indefinite detention, we can mandate new checks and balances that transcend the traditional distinctions between war and peace. If we don’t like the simultaneous isolation and Walmartization of our military, we can change the way we recruit, train, deploy, and treat those who serve, change the way we define the military’s role, and reinvigorate our civilian foreign-policy institutions.

After all, few generals actually want to preside over the military’s remorseless Walmartization: They too fear that, in the end, the nation’s over-reliance on an expanding military risks destroying not only the civilian competition but the military itself. They worry that the armed services, under constant pressure to be all things to all people, could eventually find themselves able to offer little of enduring value to anyone.

Ultimately, they fear that the U.S. military could come to resemble a Walmart on the day after a Black Friday sale: stripped almost bare by a society both greedy for what it can provide and resentful of its dominance, with nothing left behind but demoralized employees and some shoddy mass-produced items strewn haphazardly around the aisles.”

How the Pentagon Became Walmart

A Government Tyranny Meter

Evaluate this government tyranny meter by asking yourself 5 KEY questions. Determine whether Mr. Jefferson would have some concerns today about the state of tyranny in the U.S. and whether or not you should have some concerns as well.  

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Tyranny sprouts within massive organizations through influences that embed themselves in economies and assume a life of their own.

These influences become entrenched and difficult to change because they are wired to so much of economic and public life (a defense company in every state, a pork project tacked onto a defense appropriation); it becomes a subtle,sophisticated evolution.