I'd challenge this argument in regards to Vietnam. I don't think the issue is that war is hard, but rather that we keep trying to attack motivated local populations. I'm sure you're aware of the old quote that, to my knowledge, originated during the Civil War about it being "a rich man's war, and a poor man's fight." And that was absolutely true. Without conscription (which the elites were of course able to sidestep), it would have been a far less brutal war. It was people who didn't want to be fighting, fighting against people who didn't want to be fighting.
In general when fighting an enemy does not want to be fighting but is being compelled to do so, I think that opens the door to a real and meaningful victory. But when you're fighting against groups of people, often with a very flat organizational structure, who blend seamlessly with the local population (in no small part because they are the local population), and who want to be fighting you? I think victory there is near to impossible.
This is how Afghanistan, a country with the GDP of a mid-sized town in a modern nation, has defeated not only the USA but also the USSR. In terms of results, they are the most powerful fighting force in the world. But the issue when fighting them is that you don't know who you're fighting. This makes ground operations near to impossible, and sends civilian casualties skyrocketing, which creates even more motivated fighters. You kill one Taliban and create 3 more.
And furthermore, these people aren't going anywhere because it's their home. For them, the conflict is a matter of their very existence. They'll fight you for decades until they die, then their children will fight you, and so on endlessly. By contrast, we're fighting with motivations like trying to avoid geopolitical embarrassment, literally. One of the leaks in the Pentagon Papers included a memo laying out our motivations. And the primary motivation, at 70%, was "To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." [1]
Even if you imagine America somehow was able to "win" in Vietnam, you end up with an Afghanistan issue. What now? You can't just maintain millions of soldiers there indefinitely. And if the people you support are only able to stay in power because of those millions of soldiers, then it may turn out that the "war" you just won was merely a battle in in the real "war."
> I don't think the issue is that war is hard, but rather that we keep trying to attack motivated local populations.
The local population of South Vietnam, for the most part, did not want to be conquered by the communists, did not rise up against the South Vietnamese government during the Tet Offensive as the communists expected them to, and were, in fact, brutally conquered and suppressed by the communist armies that invaded them from the north after the United States abandoned them. Why do you think so many of them became refugees? These people were our allies and we abandoned them.
You’re providing a perfect example of how the United States lost a propaganda war that had, at best, an extremely loose relationship with the reality on the ground.
And the exact same thing happened in Afghanistan. The level of American presence and support for the Afghan government was minimal and would have been easily sustainable, and it had been years since a single American casualty had been suffered. The withdrawal was a completely unforced error that left billions of dollars in weapons, thousands of Afghan translators, and the biometric data to identify them all in the hands of the Taliban. It was an absolute disgrace.
The 'Afghanistan Papers' are informative - with some obvious analogs to the Pentagon Papers, it was a publication of internal military assessments in Afghanistan. [1] We assessed victory as impossible to achieve, and an increasingly large percent of all money spent on Afghanistan (as in > 40%) was ending up lost to corruption, and often going straight to the Taliban. And of course the Taliban were well integrated into the forces we were training. See - e.g. the death of General Greene in Afghanistan.
And the Taliban were inflicting a higher casualty rate on "us" (including pro-US Afghan forces), than we were on them. And "we" (only American forces) suffered casualties each and every year, including during the final withdrawal. The number of our casualties was directly reflected by size of the force there - few people, few casualties, lots of people, lots of casualties. We were losing. The years of propaganda about making progress in the country was all fabricated and cynical lies, as usual.
Basically Vietnam and Afghanistan suffered the exact same issue, that you're sidestepping. Without massive foreign interference Afghanistan was going to be ruled by the Taliban, which it now is. And without massive foreign interference, Vietnam was going to be communist, which it now is. The cost is not only in lives, but also financial. Afghanistan cost upwards of $2 trillion. Well and I also think we shouldn't just count wounded as write-offs. We're much better at keeping people alive, but somebody coming back with no limbs, or PTSD so bad that they're destined to find themselves on the street, are also costs rivaling death.
Until the withdrawal, the United States went over a year—from March 2020 to July 2021–without anyone killed in action. The thirteen Marines killed in action in August 2021 were among the troops sent back into Afghanistan when the withdrawal took a turn for the worse. The level of troops and support for the Afghan government during 2020 and early 2021 was minimal yet still sufficient to stop the Taliban from overrunning the country.
> And without massive foreign interference, Vietnam was going to be communist, which it now is.
This is like saying without massive foreign interference, Ukraine would be part of Russia again already. Vietnam went communist as a direct result of massive foreign interference from the Soviet Union and China.
On the deaths, you're counting only KIA. We had 4 die in the time frame you mentioned, out of 2500, in ways outside of direct combat. Your assessment also is directly rejected by the military's own internal assessments. Afghan security forces were being killed at a rate deemed to be unsustainable. The US was literally running out of Afghans willing to fight for it. This is probably one of the main factors in deciding to vacate. And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As for foreign interference, you clearly know Vietnam's history. Vietnam was a French colony that was occupied by Japan during WW2. Following the end of WW2, the Vietnamese themselves declared their independence, as a short-lived communist nation. However France was 'granted' the country, and this resulted in a war between France/UK vs Vietnam, which the Vietnamese ultimately lost leading to the divisions in the country and setting the stage for the Vietnam War. China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
We can get into Ukraine if you fancy, but I think that's neither here nor there for now.
Because those are the most directly relevant to the conflict. Service members dying in accidents or by suicide still happens at home, sometimes at even higher rates than it happens on deployment.
> And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As you’ve noticed, I’m not an advocate of losing wars, especially not by means of unilateral surrender. The Afghanistan withdrawal was not a military decision because the military does not have the authority to make that decision. It was a political decision.
> China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
This explanation does not fit the facts. It is inconsistent with the failure of the Tet Offensive to inspire a large scale popular uprising in South Vietnam; it failed in this objective because the people of South Vietnam were not, for the most part, sympathetic to the communists. It also doesn’t explain the vast scale and utter desperation of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communists as they overran the south of Vietnam. If the people of Vietnam wanted communist rule, why were they so desperate to escape it?
Looking at total deaths is only fair, because different situations are going to cause different attrition rates, including non-combat. Put another way, the non-combat death rate of those deployed in Afghanistan is going to be different than that for those on base at Pendleton. This is why, for instance, vaccine experiments compare all-cause mortality between the control and experiment groups.
Whether one is a fan of losing a war, or not, matters not - when you can't win. The Afghanistan Papers were the military's own assessment. We were losing, and running out of Afghans. If you wanted to keep the war going then soon enough you'd start needing large numbers of American soldiers maintaining ground ops, and that's basically not possible - we'd be getting picked off like fish in a barrel. The politicians certainly knew the Afghan security forces would collapse. The idea was probably to try to paint it as a failure of those security forces, instead of a failure of America - as would happen if we started mass deployment, and then ended up having to retreat anyhow - minimizing humiliation.
As for Vietnam, the number of initial refugees was quite low - hundreds of thousands in a country of tens of millions. And the earliest refugees were largely made up of collaborators who had every reasonable expectation of facing torture and death if they remained. It also says very little about ideology as China was one of the destinations for hundreds of thousands of the early refugees.
This fact is not disputed by anyone. You can read the US reports on the resettlement here [1]. Wiki being Wiki sites a YouTube video from the Navy, but concludes the same [2]:
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"The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon to the People's Army of Vietnam and the subsequent evacuation of more than 130,000 Vietnamese closely associated with the United States or the former government of South Vietnam...
After the Saigon evacuation, the number of Vietnamese leaving their country remained relatively small until mid-1978. A number of factors contributed to the refugee crisis, including economic hardship and wars in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. In addition, up to 300,000 people, especially those associated with the former government and military of South Vietnam, were sent to re-education camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor."
In general when fighting an enemy does not want to be fighting but is being compelled to do so, I think that opens the door to a real and meaningful victory. But when you're fighting against groups of people, often with a very flat organizational structure, who blend seamlessly with the local population (in no small part because they are the local population), and who want to be fighting you? I think victory there is near to impossible.
This is how Afghanistan, a country with the GDP of a mid-sized town in a modern nation, has defeated not only the USA but also the USSR. In terms of results, they are the most powerful fighting force in the world. But the issue when fighting them is that you don't know who you're fighting. This makes ground operations near to impossible, and sends civilian casualties skyrocketing, which creates even more motivated fighters. You kill one Taliban and create 3 more.
And furthermore, these people aren't going anywhere because it's their home. For them, the conflict is a matter of their very existence. They'll fight you for decades until they die, then their children will fight you, and so on endlessly. By contrast, we're fighting with motivations like trying to avoid geopolitical embarrassment, literally. One of the leaks in the Pentagon Papers included a memo laying out our motivations. And the primary motivation, at 70%, was "To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." [1]
Even if you imagine America somehow was able to "win" in Vietnam, you end up with an Afghanistan issue. What now? You can't just maintain millions of soldiers there indefinitely. And if the people you support are only able to stay in power because of those millions of soldiers, then it may turn out that the "war" you just won was merely a battle in in the real "war."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Impact