The anti war left has taken the position that all wars can become a quagmire. They use this belief as a general reason to oppose all uses of force. While Josh describes World War II as a total war, another way of describing it would be combat persisting, where both sides stay in contact with each other until one wins.

The insurgencies, on the other hand, are what I call semi-kinetic wars, where the weaker side attempts to avoid contact with the others combat forces, attacking instead using raids against less hardened target. The semi-kinetic wars combine a raiding strategy with political and public relations components.

In Iraq, for example, the enemy has been concentrating his attacks against non combatants. To defeat the semi-kinetic strategy, opposing forces need a high force to space ratio that cuts off the enemy's ability to move to an attack and retreat from an attack. On of the problems we have had in Iraq is that there were not sufficient troops to accompish this objective in some parts of Iraq, leaving troops in the position of have to persue and pay for the same ground more than once.

The enemy in Iraq has a pretty weak political component, but a pretty effective public relations component. He has the latter because the media has been surprising compliant in presenting his message and has failed to report the war crimes aspects of his attacks. While the media has been insistent that the US follow the Geveva Conventions, even when they do not apply, it rarely discusses the violations of those same conventions by the enemy, whose entire strategy is a violation. This greatlyaids a weak enemy that has alienated the population in Iraq, while the media has been alienating the US population from support for defeat of the enemy.

"Vietnam was a counterinsurgency, and won by the side that managed to win the civilian population over to its beliefs"

Evidence please! Neither side ever "managed to win the civilian population over to its beliefs."
If that statement was true, then how do you fit in re-education camps for about 350,000 vietnamese, all those that fled( estimates vary between 60,000 and the wildly impossible 600,000) and the 30,000 or so that were executed? Out of a population estimated at 1.4 million. Or does brainwashing and death threats form the bulk of a 'winning hearts and minds' program?
No, the VietCong won because the Americans quit. Why the Americans quit is the real question that needs to be addressed.

I think this book explains why that is so. Unfortuante we have not translated it into Arabic. Some people have to learn the hard way.

The Viet Cong didn't win anything. By 1970 or some would say 1969, the Viet Cong were not even a force that was viable or feared.

I think you meant to say the NVA, or to be more correct the North Vietnam Government. They won the war with the help of the world media and the elites of our higher education, (call them liberal, socialists if you want) by convincing the American people (voters) to convince their representives (congress) to withhold all military aid and all monies from the South Vietnam Government.

That is how the Americans "Quit".

Now on to the real subject: The attention span of a spoiled, unrealistic, sheltered, self centered nation that has been spoon fed liberal, socialist, PC crap from kindergarden thru the higher learning cycle here in the good ol' USA.

For many, many years.

Of course, where you see the different attitudes that don't reflect that bias is in the south and south west of this great Republic. Down there (here) the spirit of American greatness and splendor and right thinking is in great shape. We only wish that the Yankees and the California nuts were not so ignorant and had the ability of free thought and free will. But they don't, so we will have to shoulder the responibility of protecting this great Republic from not only our enemies without but from these idiots within.

We know we are in a long war down here, we know that Iraq and the Afgan are but the opening battles, battles that need to be won but none the less just battles in this war that will be fought for more than one generation.

We will have to deal with different administrations, different battles in different parts of the world, but we know that we will win.

We have confidence in our Republic, our Miltary and ourselves. We can handle rough and hard times. We can survive without electricity or automobiles, we can feed our families and fight off any enemy.

As for the rest of you, don't come crying to us, starving and sick. I'm afraid we will just tell you to go back to where you came from.

And Allah help any radicals or others, meaning to do us harm, be they Muslim or otherwise.

Papa Ray
West Texas
USA

Sorry I don't know what a URL is. I came to comment that the North Vietnamese defeated the South not because of disaffection among the population in South Vietnam, but because they came across the border in greater force and better armed. Your other posters seem to have beat me to it in one way or another.

Our Democratic controlled Congress had backed out on resupplying the South, which contributed greatly to their defeat. That is one of the things wrong with with withdrawing from Iraq
(Over the Horizon), supposedly to come back if needed. The lesson of Vietnam is that we wouldn't come back.

The other thing wrong with the Over the Horizon idea is that we would come back, if at all, to fight an enemy in a defense configuration, which would be very costly in American lives. The number of attackers necessary to dislodge entrenched defenders has been described variously over the decades as 9 to 1, 3 to 1, etc.

Sorry I don't know what a URL is. I came to comment that the North Vietnamese defeated the South not because of disaffection among the population in South Vietnam, but because they came across the border in greater force and better armed. Your other posters seem to have beat me to it in one way or another.

Our Democratic controlled Congress had backed out on resupplying the South, which contributed greatly to their defeat. That is one of the things wrong with with withdrawing from Iraq
(Over the Horizon), supposedly to come back if needed. The lesson of Vietnam is that we wouldn't come back.

The other thing wrong with the Over the Horizon idea is that we would come back, if at all, to fight an enemy in a defense configuration, which would be very costly in American lives. The number of attackers necessary to dislodge entrenched defenders has been described variously over the decades as 9 to 1, 3 to 1, etc.

Grumbler,

Some recent reading has led me to wonder if Vietnam was part of a global communist insurgency. The demoralization of the American home front was as much a part of that as the actions in Indochina. The US, in a sense, lost in winning our own population over to our beliefs. What say you?

Grumbler,

Some recent reading has led me to wonder if Vietnam was part of a global communist insurgency that was much better organized than we give it credit for. The demoralization of the American home front was as much a part of that as the actions in Indochina. The US, in a sense, lost in winning our own population over to our beliefs. What say you?

I'd second Chester's 9:04 p.m. thought. The enemy's Dich Van ("action among the enemy") portion of his overall "Dau Tranh" "struggle" strategy, IMHO, correctly recognized that our strategic center of gravity of the American enemy was here at home. "Dau tranh strategy sought to do battle with America on its home ground, not with guns but with weapons of perceptional obfuscation, in other words, sand in the eyes." (Douglas Pike, PAVN: People's Army of Vietnam, Presidio, 1986, p. 239). "The dich van program among Americans operated on two levels: strategic, to shape perception by the Americans so as to convince them victory in Vietnam was impossible, and therefore, undermine the war at home...; and tactical, that is, power nullification, to limit American response in Vietnam by inhibiting full use of American military power." Id.

Except for specialist works like Pike's, who examine that war through our enemy's eyes, I think there is a certain amount of reluctance among American historians of Vietnam, and among American strategic thinkers generally, to recognize that a deliberate effort was made by North Vietnam, and by the world communist movement generally, to affect our home front; much less any effort to explore the mechanics of this effort -- how it was run; the connections, if any, of parts of the anti war movement to foreign intelligence organizations and operations; these organizations evaluation of their own operations. Any effort to identify people here who might have been involved with such an effort is absolutely beyond the pale.

The scary part is that I do not think that the failure to conduct such a self-examination was limited to historians or academic writers. I am not certain that US counterintelligence or strategic planning bodies have ever looked into this issue in any kind of systematic way.

Pike's observations are extremely relevant in the current context, and I think the same sort of reluctance I've discussed here is present in public discussions of our present strategic problems, in particular the role and effect of the modern television media in the present conflict.

Ralph Peters has discussed the effect of the media on the First Battle of Fallujah in the New York Post, and Kenneth Payne has an excellent article on the "Media as an Instrument of War" in the Spring 2005 issue of Parameters, the Army War College Journal. But in general, I think there is a big taboo about discussion of this whole subject, because nobody wants to even mention anything that might remotely smack of censorship, even self-censorship.

El Jefe,

I think that as far as censorship goes, it probably isn't necessary. But, asking for a little more self-censorship make a lot of sense to me. The press never seems to check up on a lot of the dreck claimed by the other side; they never investigate, which is what they presumably get paid to do. They are extremely untransparent when it comes to who actually provides a lot of war news, and what those individuals' allegiances and motivations might be. They never accuse the other side of war crimes, only ours. And they insert references of friendly casualties in the second paragraph of unrelated stories, without giving any context for those casualties: were the troops wounded in a battle? If so, was it successful?

Finally, the press seems to have an allergy to using anyone with actual military experience as a reporter. It makes me think of CNN's famous neurosurgeon health commentator. Gupta I think his name is. God forbid someone with military experience should actually work on the ground in Iraq.

I have been reading some works on counterinsurgency doctrine this week and am convinced of two things: the Iraqi insurgency is child's play. They'll never win.

And: the press could very very easily lose the war for us. The things I mention above are not censorship. They are good faith efforts at reporting reality, and being transparent in doing so.