>>"[..] typical of modern war the politics of the fight constrain the weapons choice much more than the tactical situation. "
That's a luxury that you only can afford when the asymmetry of force is huge and you are going to win anyway.
That's a luxury that you only can afford when the asymmetry of force is huge and you are going to win anyway.
>>"[..] I'm not sure that it's fair to say that the US has "won" either of the two major asymmetric wars it's been engaged"
In order to know if the US has won, we would need to know what were the goals of those wars in the first place. I'm not sure we know that.
Human wave tactics only work well if your army consists of poorly paid conscripts with no benefits, and even then they aren't terribly effective.
One of the big takeaways I got from the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary series is that it really was a war that nobody could win. The NVA was completely outmatched and would have been crushed if the US wasn't trapped behind political barriers like the 17th parallel. At the same time the US couldn't win because the South Korean government and army was hopeless. All the US could do was "accidentally" walk into ambushes and try to kill as many North Vietnamese as possible in the hope that the government would become so weak that even the South Vietnamese army could take it.
The big takeaway is never get involved with someone else's civil war.
The NVA would have been crushed if the USA crossed that barrier and nobody else get involved in the conflict. The low probability of that happening is the reason for not crossing, so, it's actually a military barrier.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Actual_objecti...:
"The memorandum begins by disclosing the rationale behind the bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965: The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain China."
>>"The big takeaway is never get involved with someone else's civil war."
It seems that, more than a civil war, it has the characteristics of a proxy war.
from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Role_of_the_Un...
"As acknowledged by the papers: We must note that South Vietnam (unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia) was essentially the creation of the United States."
Ken Burns Vietnam documentary series was about Vietnam (1960s - 1975 ?), not the Korean War (1950 - 1953), no?
The 320,000 South Korean troops who rotated through the Vietnam War over 10+ year period were great troops according to many US veterans who were there.
And also I do not agree with the broad generalization that South Vietnamese troops were hopeless.
I agree with your "big takeaway". But the above is egregiously mistaken.
For two reasons. With Viet Nam, we're talking about a country that resisted invaders (France, China) with great tenacity and success. The North had a sense of nationhood, and favorable terrain, and a largely united political/military leadership. The US dropped more bombs on Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia than during the whole of WWII, drafted all the young men the country could stand, applied money and expertise, destroyed one if not two Presidents, and still did not come very close to winning. Hanoi and the northern mountains were never seriously threatened by US forces. One could go on.
Second reason. The US had just suffered a defeat/stalemate in Korea due to Chinese counter-invasion when it seemed the US might cross the Yalu River. The US did not want that to happen again in Viet Nam. Thus, in a very real "hard power" sense, the US did not cross the Viet Nam borders into Thailand or Laos, because of not wanting to engage China directly along a second front. This is not a political limitation, it's a very direct military limitation.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal#Cambodi...:
"U.S. bombing of Cambodia extended over the entire eastern one-half of the country and was especially intense in the heavily populated southeastern one-quarter of the country, including a wide ring surrounding the largest city of Phnom Penh. In large areas, according to maps of U.S. bombing sites, it appears that nearly every square mile of land was hit by bombs with roughly 500,000 tons of bombs dropped. [..]"