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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26823 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?

More like we left the job half done in Vietnam. Afghanistan was a counter-insurgency and nation-building fight, whereas this is a pretty straight-forward destroy-the-enemy fight. We don't even need our own troops on the ground to provide advisors and support to the Artesh, communications tech has come a long way since the 60s. And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.

We left the job done in Vietnam, though- the war goals never included the destruction of the north Vietnamese commie regime.

Judging by the assessment of John McNaughton (assistant secdef for international security affairs) in March 1965, we achieved 20% of our aims.

  1. US aims:

70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).

20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

Also—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

Not—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay if asked out.

And with the US withdrawal from the conflict, we left with 90-100% of our war goals accomplished- South Vietnam remained an independent state for several years following American withdrawal, and North Vietnam promising to respect its territorial integrity was a key promise to obtain that withdrawal. That North Vietnam reneged on that promise was perhaps predictable, but when the US agreed to withdraw all of American war aims were met at the time of withdrawal.

If in 1947 Nazi Germany somehow reconquered continental Europe then the US 'winning' WW2 is rather irrelevant and minimal even if American troops marched through Berlin and went home with a peace treaty. The political goal was a failure.

And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.

Yeah, I don't think the media is problem here. The media loves a good war.

The problem is that war is fundamentally about willpower, not firepower, and Trump has made no effort to build public support for this war. This has, in fact, been a more general aspect US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. The American public isn't willing to tolerate casualties or pain because they don't believe enough in the causes their support is being demanded for, not because they're soft or because the troops are being stabbed in the back by the media.

I don't think the media was the main factor that made the US lose in Vietnam. The main factors were:

  1. Fear of Soviet and Chinese intervention prevented the US from invading North Vietnam.
  2. Conscription made the war more than just an abstract political event for the American population. There had been conscription during the Korean War, too, but that war ended quickly enough for conscription to not become a major political problem.

I would argue that the war ended because of media coverage of the Tet offensive. Most media treated it as a massive blow to the US, a surprise attack that showed the strength of the enemy. But militarily the offensive was a failure. It didn't meet its objectives and was very costly for the Vietcong. The media portrayed this incorrectly because they were already ideologically against the war. I agree there are many factors, but ultimately I think the US lost that war because of demoralization and successful psyops from the Vietnamese.

But the US continued waging the war for 5 years after the Tet Offensive. It still had plenty of time to win the war, and/or to make the South Vietnamese military capable of defending South Vietnam, and it failed. The US did draw down its troop strength after the Tet Offensive, which likely played a role in its failure to win the war. But even 2 years after the offensive, the US troop strength was higher than it had been in 1965.

I do think the Tet Offensive and media coverage played a large role, just not a decisive one.

If the US had used an entirely volunteer military instead of using conscription, the war would still have been very unpopular in leftist circles, but the appeal of the anti-war side would have stayed relatively limited compared to the historical timeline. After all, this was the same country that went on to elect Nixon with 60% of the electoral vote in 1972 over the anti-war McGovern, despite the conscription and the failures to win the war. The hardcore anti-Vietnam-War leftists were a small subset of the US population who loom larger than their actual size because they made a large fraction of their generation's enduring movies, music, and writing — and also because the US defeat adds to the tendency to see them as having been right. It was the draft that gave the antiwawr cause resonant widespread appeal among the youth.

If the US had invaded North Vietnam, and China and the Soviet Union did not send land troops to stop the invasion in response, the US would have suffered heavy casualties but would have almost certainly won the war decisively as a result. The fear of China and the Soviet Union sending land troops into Vietnam, and/or the Soviet Union attacking Western Europe, and/or either using nukes, was the main thing that stopped the US from invading North Vietnam.

The ARVN was capable of defending Vietnam, they defeated the first invasion following US withdrawal. But the Republic of Vietnam was an corrupt dictatorship which removed their competent generals for political reasons, leading to the army collapsing in a subsequent invasion.

Would you, personally, be in favor of a ground invasion involving 400,000–500,000 US troops? How many US killed in action do you think we should be willing to commit to? 5,000? 30,000? 50,000?

Personally I wouldn't support a ground invasion at all. If I were the boss, I would be willing to commit troops to special operations and direct action missions that would provide outsized impacts that we couldn't achieve from long range strikes - but it's not clear to me that there are many targets that require that. What exactly would be the purpose of an invasion?

Also, there aren't 500,000 currently deployable ground troops in the entire US military. There may be that many troops in total, but to get most of those units ready to deploy would take months, and then months and months more to ship them overseas a few at a time. For more context, at the peak of the Iraq war we had 170,000 troops on the ground, and less than 5,000 were killed over the course of 8 years. I'm not sure you're really calibrated on this.

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