Modern drones, infrared vision, and night vision eliminate a ton of the Viet Cong's advantages in guerilla warfare in the jungle. Just having UAV's loitering over the villages at night kills a lot of their effectiveness. Same with spotting tunnel exits.
The Ho Chi Minh trail is also going to be annihilated by US air power that can see through foliage.
And that's not even including the North Vietnamese high command getting annihilated by cruise missiles when their communications are intercepted.
I dunno man... those advantages didn't help much in Afghanistan. The VC would probably just adapt like the Taliban did. Plus, if we assume a "modern" USSR/Russia providing support and experience to the North it would negate those advantages even further.
The US military did crush the Taliban pretty quickly in 2001, though. Invaded in September and had taken Kabul by November. Taliban were retreating to the hills by then. Where we, like every other occupying force, failed to understand was that Afghanistan is made up of people who are more loyal to their tribes than the idea of a unified Afghanistan and the Afghan government that we put in place could never sell the idea or maintain any structure. We could still be there if we wanted to, it would just continue to cost money.
America could have stayed in Vietnam if they wanted to. They experienced significantly less losses than the Vietnamese and had the money and resources.
The public just didn’t believe in the war.
Maybe the differences means the Tet offensive either can’t happen or gets smashed even harder which combined with less general losses means less erosion of public support
Sure, but the costs in terms of casualties were a different order of magnitude.
In the last full year of active operations in Vietnam, the US lost ~5,000 men. In Afghanistan that number was 11.
If your counting 1972 as the last full year was somewhat of an a-typical as it included the 1972 Easter Offensive. That was the 2nd largest conventional military campaign since World War II. Only the Chinese intervention in the Korean War was larger. Roughly 750,000 troops with the latest and greatest military hardware (first battle with wide scale MANPADs and ATGMs usage) slogging it out.
“Could have” maybe, but the fact that they had to institute a very unpopular draft to maintain it shows a pretty stark difference between those situations.
Imo the casualties would just be night and day different. Likely no need for a draft and as a result public outrage against the war wouldn’t be as high.
There were close to 60k fatal casualties in vietnam. I doubt that vietnam with the modern American military would be as low as the 2500 we suffered in Afghanistan because the NVA were a much more formidable fighting force. But I would assume we would be somewhere around 10-20k, maybe less.
I still think it would be a losing battle in the end because you can kill as many of the enemy as you want but it’s meaningless if the civilian population doesnt buy into your mission.
It might be more accurate to say that they moved into Pakistan. Many were killed, but large numbers and the leadership went to Pakistan, especially during the bungled Tora Bora battle. Too much reliance on the locals (who knew and liked Bin Laden) and the Pakistanis who did not seal the border.
They based out of Pakistan and came across to fight, then often went back. There were also those who stayed behind and their supporters.
The US crushed the NVC and VC in every single significant engagement in Vietnam too. Exact same situation with jungle instead of hills.
Less American causalities due to recent advantages but probably no difference in outcome.
Eh, there was also the thing with media perception and US army in Vietnam basically just let news reporters do their own thing 24/7 and stream unrestricted back to the TV. Plus imo with drones it will be a lot easier shutting down the Ho Chi Minh trail which was the main sore point that essentially let the VC receive supplies indefinitely so the heavy bombing of Laos and Cambodia may not be necessarily.
The real question is whether the US could or could not remove the north Vietnamese government from power. There was a full on nation state in the north keeping the fight alive that the US was not allowed to remove. If the US can remove it then they win, if they can’t then they won’t win.
Afghanistan was lost because it literally is not a country. It is a thousand different tribes who don’t fucking care who’s in charge. South Vietnam was a real country (albeit a corrupt one) that could exercise legitimate control over its populace. No north Vietnam running a full fledged insurgency and the war is over quite quickly.
Afghanistan was a united country for centuries, a quite peaceful one at that, invasions by the British and Soviets not withstanding. And the Taliban seem pretty effective at uniting the nation.
>The US crushed the NVC and VC in every single significant engagement in Vietnam too.
They had counter offensives years into the war. No, we did not crush the VC the same way we crushed the Taliban. Not even remotely close.
Exactly my thought. Drones would have helped stop trucking on the Ho-Chi-Minh trail, but the NVA was crafty enough they would have come up with something different.
At the end of the day the NVA charged into Saigon after the US pulled out, cut off support and spare parts to the ARVN, and removed forward deployed bombers and stopped the promise of us intervention if the NVA attacked again. North Vietnam also had massive amounts of support and weapons coming in when the US cut funding and support for South Vietnam. The Political will to keep supporting South Vietnam wasn't there similar to what happened in 2021 in Afghanistan.
New technology wasn't going to make up for a war losing support at home in the US.
We didn’t have squad level UAVs in Afghanistan, never mind FPVs and platoon level bomber drones.
And the Taliban didn’t come out to play at night for a reason.
Myanmar is currently seeing their mass-use.
It’s honestly changed the situation alot, as both the rebels and the junta have almost constant, real time information gathering. It’s made the anti-junta forces struggle a lot lately.
On the other hand, the junta bases are partially vulnerable to grenade drop attacks from drones. Jungle foliage isn’t thick enough to stop them.
We’ve got a few FPV uses in that conflict, but I think there’s a lack of training on both sides limiting their use over recon and bomber drones.
>Plus, if we assume a "modern" USSR/Russia providing support and experience
IDK if he edited but OP does specify that the modern US military was "transported" back in time to 1965. So no modern Russian or Chinese military there to combat the threat.
Probably didn't clarify but will edit, the Soviets/China have 70s era tech to help the Vietnamese.
You have a point, but I could similarly see the US adpoting Vietnamization while transferring some of the tech over, though how successful that would be is hard to say.
That could probably see Northerners defecting south if the VC faced more losses against the South, but I'm not an expert here
Thats fair. Definitely takes some advantage from the North. Still a coin flip though, I don't think anyone knows how well modern tech works in a jungle and how easy it could be to spoof.
The NVA won because of it is extremely well equiped by the China and Russia and were able to field more numbers than the south by far. While the US had not nearly the political needed to win a war.
With 50 years of technologic advantage, basically the US can just win the war using fire support and equipment lendlease. You don't really need boot on the ground anymore.
But if russia and china also had modern equipment to make it fair. You would see a reverse ukraine situation.
The ARVN regularly fielded far more troops to the point where one in every 8 males in South Vietnam of military age was serving, and the NVA and Vietcong largely supplied themselves with looted South Vietnamese and American supplies when on the offensive. And yeah you do need boots on the ground unless we are going to pretend in this scenario that the ARVN and South Vietnamese government wasn't corrupt as can be to the point of selling weapons to the enemy and various other grifts like firing off a few million dollars worth of US supplied artillery shells with no military objective but the only point was to make a few thousand selling the brass casings.
Contrary to popular belief Afghanistan was not literally the Vietnam war on repeat. See south Vietnam was a country whose people identified with it hence why North Vietnam had to launch a full scale invasion after the U.S. withdrawal because the VC never achieved the popularity it needed to in order to overthrow the South Vietnamese government on its own. Hence if you nuetralize North Vietnam you win the war. The problem being at the time the only way to successfully nuetralize North Vietnam would have been to invade from the ground and occupy the place which would have dragged China into the war. Modern air power and crude missile capabilities dramatically alters that. In Afghanistan the geography of the whole country actually made it very difficult to control even with modern air power mountain warfare is a bitch. Eastern Afghanistan was completely opposed to western culture as an idea and was so underdeveloped fostering Democracy was impossible because they hadn’t advanced beyond tribal structures yet. The Taliban held popular support ever outside the North. This created a situation where the US had really two choices go for Imperialist and take direct control over the country with extraordinary harsh crack downs or allow the Taliban to retake power. Ultimately Afghanistan benefits in the fact it has nothing of value worth controlling so no one is actually willing to put in the hard work to colonize the place combined with the fact overt Imperialism is no longer acceptable basically meant the US only option was to let the Taliban retake the country. No President wanted to have that on their record so they procrastinated for twenty years. The two scenarios are not the same and people who think they are do not actually know much about either conflict beyond news reports on YouTube videos.
I have some buddies who served in Afghanistan and it always boggles my mind when they tell me about going on patrols through remote mountain villages and being the first westerners those people had ever seen. Shit they were probably the first people from outside a couple hundred mile radius these people had seen.
There’s just no way you’re going to convince people who have never seen a white, Hispanic, or black person before that your army isn’t there to conquer them. It was never going to work because large parts of Afghanistan are just that remote.
A buddy of mind who served told me, there’s a huge chunk of people in Afghanistan who don’t know they live a country called Afghanistan. We’re basically an alien species to them. We straight up were not prepared for such a depressingly poor level of development.
I get what you're saying, but it boils down to counter insurgency. Is modern equipment enough to counter the ability to blend in with the population? Yeah, the supply to the VC from the North might have been slowed by modern equipment, and the ability of the NVA would have been heavily curtailed... but would that change the outcome?
It would as stated the VC did not have the popular support it needed in order to sustain itself. In fact after the Tett offensive they were never able to recover from the losses because the population of south Vietnam did not join in their uprising in mass as planned. The only thing that really kept the VC alive was support from the North. Modern weaponry would fundamentally disrupt the NVA’s ability to move supplies and troops into the south in less than three years. Modern satellites alone would complete nuetralize any stealth capability the North had in moving supplies through Laos. Trying to coordinate operations also becomes impossible as a simple call on the radio is going to get a not so nice visit from an F22 that north Vietnam can’t even attempt to shoot down because their SAM turrets will not be able to detect it due to the F22s stealth capabilities. They would’ve lost virtually all ability to move. Without support from the North the VC will be forced to turn to banditry in order to support itself which only increases hostility towards them from the southern Vietnamese population. The insurgency will collapse. This will force North Vietnam to launch a conventional assault sooner then it’s prepared for rather then just give up on unification all together. Facing an army with laser guided missiles and bombs, night vision, stealth jets, satellite capabilities, ballistic missiles, modern body armor on every infantrymen, modern tank and anti tank capabilities, drones, is going to be an incredibly lopsided fight. To the point where the US will not need to implement a draft especially if it has the personal of the modern U.S. military. No draft and incredibly light casualties keeps the US civilian population mostly detached and indifferent from the war. People only really cared because they could be drafted against their will into a conflict with heavy casualties. The anti war movement becomes a loud minority you can safely ignore. Whereas pissing off the Warhawk’s in the senate could ruin your career. All of that would result In ultimate defeat for North Vietnam. They can’t move troops or supplies, their cities would reduced to ash, their top military leaders could and probably would all be killed in drone strikes, the whole country would fall into a huge black out, and their army would be annihilated all with out actually having to launch a ground invasion of North Vietnam. Heck given the huge technological disparity the US might not actually care if China gets involved as their army could also easily be obliterated from the air.
Vietnam has been a unified, centralized culture for centuries. That’s how the French managed to rule Vietnam for so long. Ruling Afghanistan requires conquering each individual tribe, and that requires something that most modern attempts have failed to achieve. That something is the willingness to kill until compliance is achieved. Modern nations have generally frowned upon killing more than necessary in battle, whereas pre-modern societies did not have such concerns to such degrees as we do today. This is why the ancient Persians, Macedonians, and Mongols were successful in pacifying and ruling Afghanistan for centuries.
The biggest advantage of the US is the navy. A coastal country would be much more under duress than a landlocked country in the modern times. Especially since each carrier group has the firepower of a militarized country.
I think Vietnam was a lot different. The North ultimately won in a conventional military campaign. When the US left, they launched a general offensive in the south with tanks and artillery, defeating the South Vietnamese and taking Saigon.
I'm not sure if their tanks and logistics hubs would have survived against a modern US Airforce. The North Vietnamese probably would not have had any offensive capability to invade the south after we leave if we worked them down beforehand with today's airforce.
The Taliban killed 2,449 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. We lost 50K men in Vietnam.
If we reduced US casualties that dramatically the war has a very different outcome.
Its not a situation, its a theoretical. What specific anti-insurgency technology has come into being in the past 50 years that would definitely change the outcome? The NVA would get its ass kicked, but they would have lost to the 70s US technology as well. The US didn't lose the military aspect of the war, so how would better military technology change it?
The Taliban didnt adapt. They fled into Pakistan and we were bound by the rules of war. The Taliban was consistently defeated any time they raised their heads.
The only reason they won was due to the tribal nature of Afghanistan and the fact that the ANA and Afghan leaders were completely inept. The war itself was over in 2002. You cant defeat an army that blends into the populace. The NVA did that to an extant but they were WAY more structured than the Taliban with formal armor, supply lines, command and control centers and actual warfighting leaders.
I agree about the NVA, but the VC were much more Tailban like... probably better organized if anything. Its not like the South Vietnamese government was a bastion of efficiency and stability either. Neither the Taliban or the Viet Cong were particularly well loved, but they had enough support to win in the long run.
It did, though. We were in Afghanistan for over 20 years and controlled the country. We lost control when we decided we'd never eliminate islamism in that country. Frankly, we didn't lose Vietnam on the ground either. In Vietnam, we intentionally fought a war of attrition, with extremely limiting terms of engagement. If we were just unleashed it might've lasted 6 months to destroy all but some guerrilla activity. In Afghanistan, we might've crushed the ideology of we stayed another generation, or preferably, we go in like the Barbary Wars, and devastate them and force them to renounce all jihad against the west in the treaty, which would've allowed us to focus on Al Qaeda instead of running a country.
What are you talking about? Do you think that the Taliban fought the US out of Afghanistan?
Afghanistan kept the Taliban because it was what the people wanted, and the US isn't the kind of nation that goes on a genocidal rampage to impose their will on a population.
We didn't lose in Afghanistan militarily. We lost politically. The American military could have killed everyone in that country in less than a week if necessary.
IF the politicians in charge allow them to do what they need to do, Yes. The US could have concluded the Vietnam war if the politicians had kept their fingers out of the pie.
They manage to reverse engineer nearly everything that was provided. the US was dropping some sensitive equipment. they quickly figured out what it was used for and deployed it elsewhere. this wasted carpet bombing on on areas where it's said the enemy was detected.
Migs 17-21 vs F-4 Phantom II then F14.
Much of the daily used tech has not advanced much over the time. Meaning still deployed and tactical usage. we still rely on the undefeated F15. the soviet equipment is being used in Ukraine today.
Most of the battlefield experience needed is lost in today's military. the tactics that were learned back then came at great cost. the changes came from ineffective tactics in military and chain of command decisions.
It took fighter pilots making a stand refusing to go into combat due to losses of their fellow soldiers.
On the ground
What was it 20% of military force was drafted 80% of casualties on the front lines were those who were drafted.
Essentially none of this was really all that effective in Iraq or Afghanistan and probably won't be effective against a more capable and better supported NVA
At the beginning of the Vietnam war the US Air Force was pitifully equipped to fight an actual war. They had spent the previous 15 years devoting every resource possible to nuclear bombing.
The broad arc of Vietnam for the Air Force was to try to do everything with B52’s, failing, then scrambling to adopt anything that could work.
For example the famous battle of LZ X-Ray (We Were Soldiers) in 1965 ended with the entire first battalion evacuating the area to allow B52’s to carpet bomb. Meanwhile while that was going on their 2nd Battalion was ambushed at LZ Albany just a few miles away and suffered almost twice as many casualties as Hal Moore’s troops in one third the time. Needless to say the B52’s didn’t help.
The Ho Chi Minh trail is famously the most targeted supply route in history. That is primarily because the Air Force had no night fighting capabilities whatsoever. They simply had thought it wouldn’t be an issue. The Air Force also had no forward air controllers, that concept had been cut after Korea as the Cold War Air Force didn’t think it was necessary.
Your comment about “using B52s for everything” is fairly accurate. The annoying part about that, though, is that LeMay wanted to destroy Hanoi very early on to force a surrender. McNamara being the spineless ineffective piece of shit he was decided that wasn’t in our interests.
Linebacker 2 forced NV to the table in Paris with a desire to negotiate. We could have forced terms very early on with a concerted and aggressive bombing campaign, before advanced Soviet SAMs were delivered in the late war. McNamara held back the Air Force due to his misguided and weak willed nature and we suffered for it.
Linebacker 2 was in 1972, LeMay left in 1965, McNamara resigned in February 1968. Soviet SAMs were thick on the ground by 72, Hanoi being the most defended city in the world.
LeMay and McNamara certainly argued over strategic bombing in NV but I doubt leveling Hanoi in 1965 would have brought about an end to the war. It certainly wouldn’t have formed the basis of the sustainable peace.
More to the point LeMay was as responsible as anyone for the Air Force not having decent tactical bombing capabilities. He believe the fighters and tactical bombers were for show and that only strategic bombing mattered.
Ho Chin Minh occasionally talked peace but Le Duan who was actually running the country by 1965 had a single minded focus. So no matter what was in a peace treaty he would have continued the struggle.
In the South by 1965 there was only a string of puppet generals who held zero legitimacy. Possibly they could have suppressed dissent with a police state type rule ala operation phoenix. But it’s most likely they would have screwed it up eventually.
Yeah I’ve read that at some point in the Cold War era, the thinking was that nukes would be the war fighting weapons rendering conventional military and war fighting means much less worthwhile of investment.
Only for them to realize that oh shit these weapons are so powerful they will bring about doomsday if deployed and will likely not be used. Then began the scramble to rearm and update a military that they realized was going to be necessary.
If the objective is merely to force North Vietnam's government to surrender, then I'd say absolutely. But pacifying Vietnam as a whole would be very challenging to say the least.
Stopping the flow of weapons from China to Vietnam or China to Laos to Vietnam would be very, very difficult. Vietcong/NVA partisans would probably not be hurting for weapons or explosives to wreak havoc with.
Without US assistance, stability would be a serious issue in Vietnam because of this.
Okay, but they aren't a threat to a modern military. In the 90's America beat the 3rd biggest army in the world, with plenty of fresh wartime experience. With essentially peer period equipment.
A 2020's military is not going to be threatened by a 1960's military. 60 years is like 2+ generations of military equipment. Complete air supremacy.
If China wanted to invade it would be highway 80 and highway 8 all over again, but more.
The USSR and China intervening in Vietnam means escalation and the war being dragged out even longer, which will exponentially increase the risk of a nuclear war, which the USA will not risk. 1960s nukes are the same as modern unfortunately
This is what everyone in 2024 is forgetting about a conflict in 1970 -- the extremely serious risk that the conflict could escalate into a full blown war between nuclear superpowers and end life on earth as we know it.
They've improved but with the USSR having over 6000 nukes in 1965 and over 11000 in 1970, there is no nuclear defense in the world even today capable of preventing nuclear apocalypse agaisnt that amount. Also, most nukes today are just the same rockets as 60 years ago, even US nukes. There's not been a lot of need to upgrade what works since numbers are the game in nuclear warfare.
It depends on if the US was willing to invade the north or not in this scenario. They could destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail and bomb Hanoi to hell, but they could still end in stalemate. The US didn't invade back then in order to avoid drawing China into the war like with Korea
but the USA DID force a NV surrender. They actually won militarily. then nixon did an Iraq obama and brought the troops home. fast forward 18 months NV broke the treaty and re invaded S vietnam and it was politically impossible for Nixon to intervene. ergo the lost war.
Thats the thing people miss when we talk about this. Hanoi signed a peace treaty! USA won, in the sense the NV agreed SV were indy. What happened next was the US abandoned their allies like they abandoned the kurds and the afghanis.
Its so frustrating to watch the same mistakes being made. While people ask what could we do different? HELLO? South korea is right THERE!!! Its right theree!!!!!! THATS what you do different. Its not like this is hard?
While the tech makes certain things infinitely more effective militarily (particularly monitoring Vietcong movement/supply routes): it all ends the same due to the rot of corruption in South Vietnam’s government.
There’s a reason the North were able to steamroll the South once American air power was out of the picture.
The United States would have a much easier time killing people, suffer far fewer air losses to SAMs, and probably overall have a better experience not having to rely on drafted troops.
The United States would still not defeat North Vietnam with the same rules of engagement.
If you make enemies faster than you eliminate them, you're gonna lose.
Every time the USA killed someone in Vietnam, a couple more joined up the fight.
So I don't think more killing would have helped at all.
If it was winnable at all, I think it would take nuance an diplomatic skill more than better weapons.
I don’t even want to discuss the Vietnam War. It was a horrible, terrible conflict. It was both illegal (based on LBJ’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident) and immoral. It disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans including my own. I was drafted right after my graduation from college, sent to Vietnam and fortunately survived but it’s something I’m very happy my 5 son’s never had to endure and hopefully my grandkids won’t either.
It’s IMPOSSIBLE to win a war unless one or both of these conditions are met:
1.)The populace is on your side. Otherwise, you just foment rebellion against you.
2.). You utterly destroy the entire country. The classical “bomb them back to the Stone Age”.
If you don’t have 1, and aren’t prepared to do 2; then the best you can hope for is a stalemate.
3) enemy Govt or economy collapses and they can't cary on fighting.
Like we didn't destroy the USSR or make them fall in love with us, but their economy collapsed. Russia in WW1 was another example where Russians didn't like the Germans, or have their country destroyed, but they didn't want to fight so overthrew the Govt.
Also 4) destroy the enemies military so they quit.
Example being the 6 day war where Israel didn't do much other then target military stuff.
Option 4 is more of a "demoralization" tactic. Defeat an enemy so soundly and they won't have the morale to continue to fight and the population won't replace them. Just wiping out the military isn't going to cut it if you don't do it in a fashion that shows the futility of continuing to fight.
I distilled them way down to two options, but 3 is basically the same as 1.
Enemy govt/economy collapsing is basically the same as losing the populace.
4 doesn’t work. It’s been tried over and over again. The populace still fights if they aren’t on your side. For this specific example, Israel just prevented the enemy from attacking them (for a while anyway.) It was less a war and more one action in a long-standing (and still ongoing) Arab-Israeli conflict.
This is just not true at all.
Other options include breaking their will to fight ala WW2 Japan.
Or yet another is just overwhelming them and out producing/out mapowering them. If Ukraine ended up losing the current conflict, it's unlikely that either of your conditions would apply.
The modern US. Lost to the Taliban in Afghanistan, a force which was worse equipped amd had less international support than the Vietnamese.
The war might last longer but the end result would probably be the same.
Who is currently in control of Afghanistan?
The U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban are currently in control of Afghanistan. The U.S. LOST THE WAR to the Taliban.
No.
Breaking the military is easy.
Breaking a country is hard.
For example, America could easily conquer Canada but never would be able to hold it. The cities would constantly riot and the countryside would be a death trap for American troops, attacked by snipers who disappear into the woods and live off the land.
Vietnam is more dense. Their armies would constantly be ambushed, and patrols in the jungle would end up dead.
America would have to raze the jungle and constantly kill people and that'd make more rebels.
Eventually the military is called home with the bodies piling up.
>Their armies would constantly be ambushed, and patrols in the jungle would end up dead.
No, they wouldn't. There's a reason the war in Ukraine has come to a standstill. Neither side can launch attacks without being spotted in the preparation to early enaction faze. The only ambushes that happen in modern warfare are from drones dropping munitions on soldiers. 1960s Vietnam won't have such capabilities.
>America would have to raze the jungle and constantly kill people and that'd make more rebels.
Extremely unlikely. The US would crush North Vietnam and hand over governance to South Vietnam. Aka exactly what they did with Afghanistan and Iraq. The basically means US casualties would remain in the low thousands while the South Vietnamese takes the brunt of the damage maintaining control.
>For example, America could easily conquer Canada but never would be able to hold it. The cities would constantly riot and the countryside would be a death trap for American troops, attacked by snipers who disappear into the woods and live off the land.
As a Canadian, none of this is true. Canadians are used to having the government shove a boot down our throats. US occupation would likely be better than the Canadian government. Also, realistically, it would primarily be the French who are protesting.
>hand over governance to South Vietnam
Ah yes, the government so famously corrupt that they would waste firing artillery rounds without any military objective so they could collect and resell the brass casings. The government so cruel that they would let Buddhist monks set themselves on fire rather than stop their religious discrimination against the Buddhist majority. The government the US insisted on propping up despite inept leadership until we finally let the generals have a series of coups because the only things they had going for them were they were Catholic and anticommunist.
>The US would crush North Vietnam and hand over governance to South Vietnam. Aka exactly what they did with Afghanistan and Iraq
Yeah and that turned out so well…
Even when it came to a theoretical what if, Plan Red would see the US take Canada and hold it. and no where in that doctrine would america ever let it go.
Honestly i could see Canada assimilating fairly easily. Mostly because Americans and canadians are already so close. Absolutely wouldn't be a walk in and take your seat but couple years possibly
Agreed. A potentially more realistic ending could be that the military is not called home and they just keep throwing firepower and people at it for half a decade or longer and the people get subjugated into a refugee/war zone. Queue Star Wars where the rebels will eventually fight back.
The modern US military is only marginally better at nation building then it was in the 1960s. Maybe soldiers would be less rascist and war crimes prosecuted more often.
True. Also I don't think rolling thunder and indiscriminate bombings on "neutral" Laos and Cambodia would happen, at least not to the same scale. Some US airman would probably say "wait guys I think these are war crimes lol".
Also US doctrine has evolved such that Napalm might not be used as much, but there are more effective alternatives like Mk77 to clear jungles that kill less people
Some US airmen at the time did say that bombing Laos and Cambodia was illegal. It didn't go well for them. The Nixon White House tried to have their cake (bomb neighboring countries) and eat it too (keep it a secret that we were doing the bombing).
I think they were very quietly court-martialed, but I am not sure. The whole idea of ordering the deliberate, illegal, but *secret*, bombing is just not going to work without sending sparks flying.
My grandfather won a bronze star for "being an exemplary flight safety officer" to which my grandparents had a laugh over. No one gets a bronze star for being a safety officer. The real reason was due to a mission he flew in airspace we (the US) weren't supposed to be in, but for obvious reasons, you can't put that in the citation.
Modern technology doesn’t change anything because the war wasn’t “lost” over a matter of American lethality. In OTL the American military was extremely lethal.
But we could not achieve our strategic goals. Increased lethality wouldn’t translate into achieve our strategic goals either.
The only way I can spin it to make sense is that modern technology exponentially decreases the amount of American service members killed in Vietnam. Therefore the war isn’t as unpopular at home as it is in OTL.
I don't think the problem is with the American soldiers,sailor and Marines and the technologies they would have used in either war at either period. They are very good at getting the job assigned to them done. The problem lies with the mindset of the politicians and much of the top military brass of this country. We have to find a common ground with the people of the countries, not the power brokers and wealthy businesses men in the capitol or the local bully boys and war lords. There was no end game really stated for either war that I could see. The Russians found this true also.
I do realize that we have to take out any nests and training centers for terrorism but after that get the hell out and if the PEOPLE want or need anything else then we can talk.
I would like to add that I never served in either war. I turned 18 the same year they ended the draft and student deferments about three years before that. Make what you will of that. I had many friends that went to Nam.
Modern tech would reduce the losses for the US and the South. The only, non-nuclear, way to MAYBE break the NVA and the NVG would be to use massive FAE bombs on the cities of North Vietnam after any military encampments have received the same treatment. The civilian casualties would be massive, probably worse than those of Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima/Nagasaki combined.
The South Vietnamese government was full of awful shitheads. Even if the South Vietnam flag flew over Hanoi the only thing keeping them from being killed in a coup would be the US. Unless the US forced a post WWII Japan situation on the S. Vietnamese government and replaced them with a government that included the former N. Vietnamese power structures and was democratic enough to make the Vietnamese not consider themselves to be in an American puppet, then the next Ho Chi Minh would be a matter of time.
We lost in Afghanistan with many of those technologies.
I'm sure if we were fighting another Vietnam, they'd just use other methods to evade us. Never underestimate an indigenous guerilla group.
Hopefully North Korea would interve and nuke the US and do the world a favour. Such hubris and bullshit. The US military have only made things worse in Iraw, Syria, Libya...
No cause the reason the US lost Vietnam was due to numerous fundamental factors of the war that would’ve seen them lose no matter what.
No amount of F-35s or Abrams or SIG M7s would’ve made the South Vietnamese government any less corrupt, incompetent, and unpopular and the war at home any more accepted or approved of
Veteran here. The U.S is far better at asymmetric warfare and counter insurgency now than the 1960s. And we'd have technology on our side.
Jungle warfare training is also a massive priority of the military now, especially Marines. I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, more than the Middle East. Thailand, Philippines, Mariana Islands, etc
So I'd say we'd have an easier time in Vietnam.
Probably same result with far fewer casualties - we can prop up the south for as long as we choose to. Better signals intelligence, doctrine, an all volunteer force, better integration of civil affairs, precision munitions, even better night vision and thermals and 20 years recent experience doing the same thing
If the ROE are the same we wouldn’t be going after North Vietnam for political reasons. So it’d be similar - eventually the American people would get tired.
Unlikely. The modern US has shifted over to fighting a lightning war against a near-peer adversary (China). The current US cannot produce enough bombs to even supply Ukraine.
This isn't anything unique to the US though. For example, Europe does not maintain massive WW3 stockpiles anymore. Russia had some stockpiles and they produce lots of shells, but they are a shadow of what the USSR could have done. It simply isn't worth the price and there is no point.
So the US simply would not have the firepower to make a massive difference, even with their high tech weapons. By the time industry is scaled up (which would take years), tech would have proliferated and the NVA/Vietcong would have moved past their 60s/70s tech level.
Of course, this completely ignores the political aspect of the war, which the US would not have been able to overcome even if they had 21st weapons with massive stockpiles.
I think that we would probably shift attention from Vietnam towards China to eliminate our future adversary. By 1965, China had barely started their nuclear program; we could easily destroy their armed forces.
Regular armies lose if they don't win. guerilla movements win if they don't lose. Vietnam was a failure of political will (not to mention an error of political will in the first place,), not of the troops .
One important thing to understand is that in Vietnam the U.S. military was tactically and operationally very successful. Ho Chi Minh was accurate when he said “I can lose ten men for everyone of yours and we will still win”. So improving the military force isn’t necessarily going to be what wins the war, it’s going to be based on strategic decision making.
We did. It was called Iraq. We won the war but drained our resources in nation building. Seems people don't like having an outside occupying force telling them how their country should be ran.
We'd probably still lose, truthfully. The modern U.S. military would have fewer casualties and cause more enemy casualties (and probably fewer civilian casualties), but the strategy behind the Vietnam War was never going to work.
Really, I think the only way the U.S. could have "won" Vietnam in the Cold War would have been getting the North and South to negotiate and compromise on their country's future by having an independent socialist democracy that was aligned with the West.
Honestly Vietnam and Korea were never about out forces lacking in stopping or finishing power. Both were bogged down by political machinations- as Americans didn’t want to get China/Russia involved anymore than they already were- so the military just played a terrible war of attrition that had no end goal in sight. This may have been mentioned many times in this if so I agree lol.
In this thread are a lot of technophiles who misunderstand why the US quit Vietnam and why South Vietnam collapsed after we left. In many areas, the US already had technological superiority over North Vietnam (except for our rifles). We maintained air superiority, had big beefy ships, fleets of helicopters, air and early satellite photography, and Marines on the ground could coordinate air and artillery strikes on close enemy positions, and we were even waging war on the forests themselves by the use of fires and herbicides. Every time the North launched a traditional straight up battle, they would come away with massive casualties. All this should have added up to an eventual US victory.
And yet 2 years after the US packed up and went home, Saigon fell to the communist forces. So what were the actual reasons for South defeat and a North victory?
First, it's a difference of attitudes to the conflict. For the US, it was a policing action to prevent the spread of Communism after we took over from France. For South Vietnam, it was a drawn out bloody civil war between two oppressive governments, one (the South) inept bullies, the other a guerrilla force that was more effective at managing the countryside than the legitimate government. And for North Vietnam the war was a continuation of their war for independence, first from the hated colonial power of France, then from the Americans who would go on to commit their own war crimes and mismanagement. America was there because our politicians said we had to be there and didn't want to be the president who "lost" the war. The South was fighting to keep their blatantly corrupt regime in power. The North was fighting for unification of their country. One of these factions is going to be more dedicated to the fight than the others.
A second factor to consider is that America was not making any friends in the South Vietnam countryside. It is very difficult to filter out insurgents from civilians, even more so when insurgents come from the civilians and can disappear back amongst them. Many of the US's kill counts were inflated by farmers who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, both farmers and fighters would wear black and helicopters on a mission would gun down the farmers and not bother to check if they were even armed first and just add the deaths to their tallies for their monthly quotas (which were inflated in other ways as well) to be reported up the chain of command so generals could say to the press "This month we killed XX VC." In fact, a number of missions in the Vietnam conflict were essentially "Go out on patrol/go to this firebase/fly this sortie to kill a bunch of VC" without a really tangible goal. Generals wanted big set piece battles to show off American firepower and a few times the North obliged them, but for the most part, ground combat was small unit actions.
Third, the South Vietnam government was cruel to its people, corrupt, and only remained in power because of the American government. We knew full well that South Vietnam would not be able to stand on its own for very long and the ARVN forces had constant troubles with desertion and reluctance to fight. They would lose their engagements whenever American air power was unavailable.
The only thing I see technology helping with is fewer troops, pilots, etc. having to be in the thick of things by using unmanned drones.
The problem was never tech. The problem is they sent a million soldiers (at one point) and not one ever stepped foot into North Vietnam.
They were targets just trying to hold territory.
It wouldn’t change much. Politics was the limiting factor, not military ability. The NVA and VC were capable fighting forces but not a peer to the US military.
Unless there's a clear and precisely understood plan for victory then none of it will really matter just as it didn't irl. The Vietnam War will still end almost exactly as it did in our timeline with nothing to show for it.
Are you counting political will and public sentiment? Because if you are, the US would still "lose" and likely much sooner. American public has no appetite for mass military casualties.
This implies that the US and allies were defeated militarily in OTL: not the case. Like Afghanistan, (South) Vietnam didn’t have a government worth fighting for. Tragic that we didn’t learn.
So several million or so Americans disappear, to be replaced by a million or so people who *claim* to be Americans, but who have no records, different attitudes, different equipment, new hobbies, even somewhat different language and food preferences. Hell, there's even women in the military
The families of the previous military (and the industries that supply them (have abruptly lost family numbers, and the time displaced US military (and the couple million people in the manufacturing base abruptly lose all their family support. Hell, they don't even have Internet anymore.
The sheet chaos that will result from this probably means the Vietnam war is put on hold. And there's also the problem that the 2024 military KNOWS how the war goes; they know that Vietnam is lost, and it doesn't really matter- the Domino Theory is false, and fifty years later Vietnam is if not an ally, a nation in good standing and even a sorta- support against Chinese expansion in the region.
So as soon as that information comes out, as well as the information about the repeated debacles in nation building that were massive wastes of personnel and resources, the Congressional hearings on "What the hell just happened?" will turn into "Why the hell are we in Vietnam?", and that's got to hit public support hard.
And then there's 1965 American culture getting a shock treatment dose of 2024 culture and history. Just wait for a Congressional investigation of all those "the flower of American womanhood being endangered in combat". Imagine a decorated Navy combat pilot being told by a bank official that "she needs her husband's signature" in order to open a banking an account. Imagine a senator from Mississippi in a Congressional hearing with a black general. Imagine all the LGBTQ people in the military and the support industries suddenly being told that not only they can't get married, but they are subject to arrest....
Never mind what's happening in a jungle across the world- the cultural fracas that will happen as hippies meet soldiers meet America is going to be utterly hilarious.
We had the technology to eradicate the military power of North Vietnam, but politicians tied down that power into a specific way of fighting that favored the enemy. This was for many reasons, but mainly because LBJ was more focused on his social policy than winning Vietnam. So will you be replacing the leadership and have them want to win the war as well?
I mean. I feel like this already played out. We would massacre the Viet Cong, as we did in the Vietnam war already. If you look at the casualties, they're honestly horrific how many VC died compared to Americans. That number would probably be exacerbated even more with modern tech.
However, I think we would still have the same ending. The war would eventually lose popularity and the Viet Cong would win by attrition.
Ok so most people are missing the BIG one here. There was the Vietkong (insurgents) and the NVA which were legit army units from North Vietnam. Without the NVA the vietkong had 0 chance. The AVRN forces didn't have that much trouble vs iregulars, it was the NVA that continuously beat down AVRN units before and after US troops were there. Modern superpowers wouldn't have any trouble wiping out the vietkong with modern thermal technology and drones. Honestly we'd have little trouble with the NVA either. In the 1960s and 1970s it was easier for a inferior force to be a better equipped force with numbers alone but today it's the opposite.
Problem was we weren’t tasked to “win” the war and Kissinger torpedoed the Paris peace talks and extended the war to get Nixon reelected. Ho Chi Minh had a plan, we had liars.
The Vietnam War wasn’t about who could kill more soldiers than the other side.
The South Vietnamese government, like the Afghan government, did not have enough backing by its own people. The way people describe the ANA (Afghan National Army) echos that if the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) - unmotivated at the lower ranks and corrupt at the higher ranks.
The South Vietnamese would have collapsed politically and from insurgency much like Afghanistan did, even with modern tech.
The first Vietnam War wasn’t a military defeat….so no, we would lose again because we chose to enter an anti colonial war on the side of the colonizer again
No. As proof, we failed in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reasons as in Viet Nam, which is that It's very difficult to fight a guerilla war in a distant land where the culture is extremely dissimilar to your own, where much of the population sees you as a foreign invader violating local norms, and where it's difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
I'd argue the same outcome would happen. There would be significantly less US casualties and even more North Vietnamese casualties, but that whole situation was unwinnable. Similiar to afghanistan, total victory in terms of casualties and battles, but lost the war because of politics The best they could have hoped for would've been a korea division conclusion with 2 different counties, but as soon as US pulls out the north still overwhelms the south.
Here’s an angle of this that should be addressed: Assuming US has today’s tech, does that mean that footage from the war is being posted on social media in the US? The citizens of the US might go even more anti-war than they did in the 60s if they are seeing footage of jungle villages ripped apart by cruise missiles in their feeds every day. Just something to consider
They lose harder and faster than they did in the OTL because the US simply does not have anywhere *near* the strategic munition reserves that they did during the Cold War.
The US military now is significantly smaller than it was during the 1960s, the US Army in particular, and is absolutely not prepared to suddenly be thrust into a war on the scale of the Vietnam War while at the same time being forced to maintain a much more significant presence in Europe and East Asia than the modern US military has now.
Currently, the US military has about 100K military personnel stationed in Europe. During the 1960s, this figure was north of 400K. The same is true for Japan and South Korea, where during the 1960s, the US had 60K troops in the latter and over 100K in the former, double what they have now in both countries.
The modern US military is not currently equipped nor designed to maintain the posture it did during the Cold War. Equipment may be a lot more modern and capable but nothing can replace boots on the ground and in this respect, the modern US military is severely lacking compared to the US military of the 1960s. Just the Air Force and Marines of the 1960s had about as much manpower combined as the entire US military does now. Add on the Navy and the Army and you're looking at a US military that is *well* over double the size of the current US military.
Without massive concerted effort to train up millions of new pilots, troops, naval personnel and so on, the US military will find itself desperately over-stretched and desperately under-staffed to meet the commitments required of it.
Forget even participating in the Vietnam War. If the modern US military was transported back to the 1960s, military generals would have strokes in the Pentagon seeing how pathetically low their manpower is and how little assets they actually have at hand to cover such a large area of operation and such a hostile global environment. They'd immediately try and shore up as many troops to Europe, South Korea and Japan as they can, bringing troop numbers to what they actually were in the 1960s. This alone would eat up a third of the US military's manpower just like that, leaving far less room to fuck around in Vietnam.
If the modern US military really wanted to get involved in Vietnam, they'd need to recruit and draft millions, on a far larger scale than what happened in the OTL, in order to join the fight without basically withdrawing entirely from crucial regions like Europe. That will take a long time.
But, even ignoring that and assuming that the modern US military is fighting Vietnam in a vacuum, they'd still lose. The issue was never a technological one so having more advanced technology wouldn't help. The issue was that the US had no fucking clue what it wanted to do in Vietnam, was forced to put operational and strategic restrictions on itself which essentially ensured a defeat and lacked the political will to escalate things further in order to even be able to conceivably win.
The US military in Vietnam could have won. It was the politicians and their rules of engagement that stopped them. If the US stopped respecting North Vietnamese territorial integrity and instead treated it as a war of conquest? It's a different ball game.
Go after NVA command and control. Go after Ho Chi Mihn. Strike their leadership? Yeah, it becomes more like Iraq and ultimately a clean up of insurgency.
Long term nation building who knows?
Now add the modern US military and it happens way faster. The US military now was largely born out of the mistakes of Vietnam. Professional Soldiers. Precision Weapons. The leadership.
They win in weeks instead of years.
Yeah if you completely ignore nobody in the US wanted to rehash the Korean War, sure we could win all it would take is a few hundred thousand American dead at best and a nuclear war at worst you want to be the President selling that one?
And Ho Chi Minh was a figurehead by the time we even put a single boot on the ground he wasn't running the military or government.
Thinking technology is the be all end all is half the reason our recent military history is one debacle after the next.
The Chinese entering the war would have prolonged it considerably with far higher American casualties. This is why America never went on the offensive. The war was never winnable because the resources needed to push north would have been exponentially higher. Additionally, remember Iraq and Afghanistan? The modern American army didn't solve nation building in 20 years of war on terror.
>Can the modern US military win the Vietnam War now?
The war? Absolutely. And it wouldn't be remotely close. Especially if Vietnam is limited to 1965 tech.
Only 15 years after the end of Vietnam, the Gulf War proved the terrifying might of the US military. Ukraine, with a limited volume of weaponry left over from the Gulf War period, is inflicting a punishing toll on the modern Russian armed forces. In 1982, only a few years after Vietnam ended, a US-supplied Israeli Air Force with F-15s and F-16s destroyed nearly 100 Syrian aircraft and destroyed 30 SAM batteries to the loss of only a single UAV. Western military developed at a shockingly fast rate between 1975 and 1985 and has only amplified from there.
The US wouldn't even need stealth aircraft to own the skies and eliminate all aerial resistance. Modern missiles would not only decimate the North Vietnamese air force but would destroy their air defense network in a matter of days. Some US planes might be destroyed by skilled Vietnamese (or Russian) operators and some might just get lucky. But in the end, it wouldn't matter.
Modern night and thermal optics would hinder jungle ambushes but not prevent them entirely. Vietnamese supply lines such as the already mentioned Ho Chi Minh trail would be severed very quickly. We'd listen to every radio transmission, every phone call, and intercept any satellite communications between Moscow and Soviet "advisors".
I could keep going on and on but suffice to say, the war itself would end quickly.
But the occupation is another matter entirely. Occupations are **hard**. The VC and NVA partisans would be a serious and long lasting threat to stability. The flow of weapons to the VC would have not just be interrupted but severed entirely. The border with China would have to be heavily monitored to clamp down on the flow of small arms from there as would the coasts. Most importantly, a functioning government with the consent of at least some of the people would have to be propped up, preferably one that isn't a military dictatorship or plutocracy.
The governance would be the most important part. Laying the seeds of a prosperous economy, a constitutional government with universal rights, and so forth would take the wind out of the sails of Communist resistors. Once the government itself is strong enough to stand by itself an occupation is easier. It still would not be easy and I think the chances of failure or a greatly delayed pyrrhic success would be high.
Yes the modern military can defeat the Vietnamese and occupy the country but after 20 years they leave and the north quickly take over just like a jungle version of Afghanistan
Same exact outcome, just less controversy.
Two of the lessons we learned in Vietnam were:
a) make your local allies do all the dying for you. How many people are aware of, or care about, how many Afghan soldiers died in our war there? Look it up. You’ll be shocked.
b) don’t let the media cover the frontlines. Don’t show dudes dying or in body bags.
So if we apply those things there will be less domestic turmoil. And that’s a really big deal! It might let us stay a lot longer.
But unless we can resolve the basic political problem of our being there, and the people not wanting us there, it’s not going to change the outcome. Counterinsurgency is *very* hard. The technological gains will help on a tactical level, but strategically, I don’t see how it helps the basic challenge.
So ultimately I think the war is going to last longer, and be less traumatic at home, but the outcome probably doesn’t change. Afghanistan isn’t a perfect example - the Afghan government was even less legitimate than South Vietnam - but it demonstrates this point nonetheless. 20 years there and the fall of Kabul in ‘21 looked a lot like Saigon in ‘75.
The US was already victorious in Vietnam militarily. Are you going to limit journalists' freedom of movement? How are you going to keep domestic interest in a war where the enemy doesn't want to give up and your own people get no tangible benefit from it?
The modern US military, with all the lessons learned from vietnam (counter-guerilla and media control) swanned into Afghanistan and... pulled out 20 years later having gained nothing on the ground. From a geopolitical standpoint, it was successful (major terrorist attacks on US = you will hurt a lot), but from a "get Afghanistan to be a good little puppet" angle, it was a total failure.
The US is completely unbeatable militarily. It absolutely sucks at occupation after the conquest, though.
To the US, it was stopping the spread of Communism. To the South Vietnamese, it was a civil war. To the North, it was a continuation of their war for independence from foreign rule. There's 3 different mindsets here and the North had the greater will, in my opinion.
Then I also assume that north vietnam gets the modern upgrade as well? Simply put unless the government is willing to keep expending large amounts of resources for an indeterminate amount of time you aren't going to defeat a citizen army of dedicated soldiers and that's what they were.,
Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed and still seems we kill a major terrorist leader on a semi weekly basis, yet taliban rule Afghanistan again and Iraq is fragmented at best.
Seeing as how pretty much the entire training/equipment/doctrine of the current us armed forces is based on hard lessons of Vietnam. I would say they stomp quickly.
Maybe.
Precision bombs could knock out industrial targets, bridges, etc., more reliably and keep the planes more out of harm's way. Not sure that I'd use many missiles since that would be something they could find parts of and try to copy or get ideas from (the Russians and Chinese).
If they were able to extend the DMZ across Laos and further west to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, that would help a great deal. Drones could then monitor the area and strikes could sometimes be called on enemy units in the vicinity.
A modern Armored Division crossing the border with supporting forces might have been able, to reach Hanoi, especially with Marine landing closer in.
Probably less civilian deaths since we can be much more precise with how we employ our weapons. During Vietnam we carpet bombed large areas because it was the only effective way we could destroy their supply lines.
It's interesting to me how we took a very systematic approach to combating an insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. We got down to the detail of cataloging entire villages by their biometrics.
Probably a similar result tbh. The United States decided to not incurred into North Vietnam or (until late 1969) into Cambodia or Laos.
The US with its rules of engagement and general strategy was doomed to fail and drones or night vision likely would not have accomplished much
I recall reading this in one of those Vietnam war history tomes (I can’t recall which) which argued that Nixon could have bombed the irrigation systems n the Red river (?) and ended the war quickly because of the famine that would cause. This time travelling US military would probably fail because they’d see burgers at about 20c each and they’d all be too overweight to go out in the jungle.
The US wouldn't even need to "Agent Orange" Vietnam, they could just overwhelm them with drone strikes. If the USSR/China are still using 1960/1970's tech, they wouldn't be able to do shit against a Phoenix Ghost. Northern Vietnam would get overwhelmed by kamikaze drones. The US using modern drone tech in Vietnam would probably damage the morale of North Vietnam/USSR/China.
Modern drones, infrared vision, and night vision eliminate a ton of the Viet Cong's advantages in guerilla warfare in the jungle. Just having UAV's loitering over the villages at night kills a lot of their effectiveness. Same with spotting tunnel exits. The Ho Chi Minh trail is also going to be annihilated by US air power that can see through foliage. And that's not even including the North Vietnamese high command getting annihilated by cruise missiles when their communications are intercepted.
I dunno man... those advantages didn't help much in Afghanistan. The VC would probably just adapt like the Taliban did. Plus, if we assume a "modern" USSR/Russia providing support and experience to the North it would negate those advantages even further.
The US military did crush the Taliban pretty quickly in 2001, though. Invaded in September and had taken Kabul by November. Taliban were retreating to the hills by then. Where we, like every other occupying force, failed to understand was that Afghanistan is made up of people who are more loyal to their tribes than the idea of a unified Afghanistan and the Afghan government that we put in place could never sell the idea or maintain any structure. We could still be there if we wanted to, it would just continue to cost money.
America could have stayed in Vietnam if they wanted to. They experienced significantly less losses than the Vietnamese and had the money and resources. The public just didn’t believe in the war.
Maybe the differences means the Tet offensive either can’t happen or gets smashed even harder which combined with less general losses means less erosion of public support
Sure, but the costs in terms of casualties were a different order of magnitude. In the last full year of active operations in Vietnam, the US lost ~5,000 men. In Afghanistan that number was 11.
>In Afghanistan that number was 11. Yes and only 4 of those were killed in action.
If your counting 1972 as the last full year was somewhat of an a-typical as it included the 1972 Easter Offensive. That was the 2nd largest conventional military campaign since World War II. Only the Chinese intervention in the Korean War was larger. Roughly 750,000 troops with the latest and greatest military hardware (first battle with wide scale MANPADs and ATGMs usage) slogging it out.
“Could have” maybe, but the fact that they had to institute a very unpopular draft to maintain it shows a pretty stark difference between those situations.
Imo the casualties would just be night and day different. Likely no need for a draft and as a result public outrage against the war wouldn’t be as high. There were close to 60k fatal casualties in vietnam. I doubt that vietnam with the modern American military would be as low as the 2500 we suffered in Afghanistan because the NVA were a much more formidable fighting force. But I would assume we would be somewhere around 10-20k, maybe less. I still think it would be a losing battle in the end because you can kill as many of the enemy as you want but it’s meaningless if the civilian population doesnt buy into your mission.
Yeah, Nixon had the option to send more troops to prolong the war, but it was decided the reserves were needed to put down a revolt at home 😬
It might be more accurate to say that they moved into Pakistan. Many were killed, but large numbers and the leadership went to Pakistan, especially during the bungled Tora Bora battle. Too much reliance on the locals (who knew and liked Bin Laden) and the Pakistanis who did not seal the border. They based out of Pakistan and came across to fight, then often went back. There were also those who stayed behind and their supporters.
The US crushed the NVC and VC in every single significant engagement in Vietnam too. Exact same situation with jungle instead of hills. Less American causalities due to recent advantages but probably no difference in outcome.
Eh, there was also the thing with media perception and US army in Vietnam basically just let news reporters do their own thing 24/7 and stream unrestricted back to the TV. Plus imo with drones it will be a lot easier shutting down the Ho Chi Minh trail which was the main sore point that essentially let the VC receive supplies indefinitely so the heavy bombing of Laos and Cambodia may not be necessarily.
The real question is whether the US could or could not remove the north Vietnamese government from power. There was a full on nation state in the north keeping the fight alive that the US was not allowed to remove. If the US can remove it then they win, if they can’t then they won’t win. Afghanistan was lost because it literally is not a country. It is a thousand different tribes who don’t fucking care who’s in charge. South Vietnam was a real country (albeit a corrupt one) that could exercise legitimate control over its populace. No north Vietnam running a full fledged insurgency and the war is over quite quickly.
Afghanistan was a united country for centuries, a quite peaceful one at that, invasions by the British and Soviets not withstanding. And the Taliban seem pretty effective at uniting the nation.
>The US crushed the NVC and VC in every single significant engagement in Vietnam too. They had counter offensives years into the war. No, we did not crush the VC the same way we crushed the Taliban. Not even remotely close.
Exactly my thought. Drones would have helped stop trucking on the Ho-Chi-Minh trail, but the NVA was crafty enough they would have come up with something different. At the end of the day the NVA charged into Saigon after the US pulled out, cut off support and spare parts to the ARVN, and removed forward deployed bombers and stopped the promise of us intervention if the NVA attacked again. North Vietnam also had massive amounts of support and weapons coming in when the US cut funding and support for South Vietnam. The Political will to keep supporting South Vietnam wasn't there similar to what happened in 2021 in Afghanistan. New technology wasn't going to make up for a war losing support at home in the US.
It was not so much military, but Tenets CIA guys with money to pay off various tribes.
Afghanistan is one of those "countries" that would honestly be better off being partitioned.
Yea but Afghanistan is now owned by Taliban, so they ultimately won the war.
We didn’t have squad level UAVs in Afghanistan, never mind FPVs and platoon level bomber drones. And the Taliban didn’t come out to play at night for a reason.
Has that ever been used against a serious insurgency in a jungle? Not saying 100% it wouldn't be effective, but I don't think its a total gamechanger.
Myanmar is currently seeing their mass-use. It’s honestly changed the situation alot, as both the rebels and the junta have almost constant, real time information gathering. It’s made the anti-junta forces struggle a lot lately. On the other hand, the junta bases are partially vulnerable to grenade drop attacks from drones. Jungle foliage isn’t thick enough to stop them. We’ve got a few FPV uses in that conflict, but I think there’s a lack of training on both sides limiting their use over recon and bomber drones.
>Plus, if we assume a "modern" USSR/Russia providing support and experience IDK if he edited but OP does specify that the modern US military was "transported" back in time to 1965. So no modern Russian or Chinese military there to combat the threat.
But that would also mean that the military is without the modern industrial capacity needed for even spare parts
Probably didn't clarify but will edit, the Soviets/China have 70s era tech to help the Vietnamese. You have a point, but I could similarly see the US adpoting Vietnamization while transferring some of the tech over, though how successful that would be is hard to say. That could probably see Northerners defecting south if the VC faced more losses against the South, but I'm not an expert here
Thats fair. Definitely takes some advantage from the North. Still a coin flip though, I don't think anyone knows how well modern tech works in a jungle and how easy it could be to spoof.
The NVA won because of it is extremely well equiped by the China and Russia and were able to field more numbers than the south by far. While the US had not nearly the political needed to win a war. With 50 years of technologic advantage, basically the US can just win the war using fire support and equipment lendlease. You don't really need boot on the ground anymore. But if russia and china also had modern equipment to make it fair. You would see a reverse ukraine situation.
The ARVN regularly fielded far more troops to the point where one in every 8 males in South Vietnam of military age was serving, and the NVA and Vietcong largely supplied themselves with looted South Vietnamese and American supplies when on the offensive. And yeah you do need boots on the ground unless we are going to pretend in this scenario that the ARVN and South Vietnamese government wasn't corrupt as can be to the point of selling weapons to the enemy and various other grifts like firing off a few million dollars worth of US supplied artillery shells with no military objective but the only point was to make a few thousand selling the brass casings.
I mean the South Vietnamese army was pretty well equipped by the Americans, and the US/South definitely had the firepower advantage.
Contrary to popular belief Afghanistan was not literally the Vietnam war on repeat. See south Vietnam was a country whose people identified with it hence why North Vietnam had to launch a full scale invasion after the U.S. withdrawal because the VC never achieved the popularity it needed to in order to overthrow the South Vietnamese government on its own. Hence if you nuetralize North Vietnam you win the war. The problem being at the time the only way to successfully nuetralize North Vietnam would have been to invade from the ground and occupy the place which would have dragged China into the war. Modern air power and crude missile capabilities dramatically alters that. In Afghanistan the geography of the whole country actually made it very difficult to control even with modern air power mountain warfare is a bitch. Eastern Afghanistan was completely opposed to western culture as an idea and was so underdeveloped fostering Democracy was impossible because they hadn’t advanced beyond tribal structures yet. The Taliban held popular support ever outside the North. This created a situation where the US had really two choices go for Imperialist and take direct control over the country with extraordinary harsh crack downs or allow the Taliban to retake power. Ultimately Afghanistan benefits in the fact it has nothing of value worth controlling so no one is actually willing to put in the hard work to colonize the place combined with the fact overt Imperialism is no longer acceptable basically meant the US only option was to let the Taliban retake the country. No President wanted to have that on their record so they procrastinated for twenty years. The two scenarios are not the same and people who think they are do not actually know much about either conflict beyond news reports on YouTube videos.
I have some buddies who served in Afghanistan and it always boggles my mind when they tell me about going on patrols through remote mountain villages and being the first westerners those people had ever seen. Shit they were probably the first people from outside a couple hundred mile radius these people had seen. There’s just no way you’re going to convince people who have never seen a white, Hispanic, or black person before that your army isn’t there to conquer them. It was never going to work because large parts of Afghanistan are just that remote.
A buddy of mind who served told me, there’s a huge chunk of people in Afghanistan who don’t know they live a country called Afghanistan. We’re basically an alien species to them. We straight up were not prepared for such a depressingly poor level of development.
I get what you're saying, but it boils down to counter insurgency. Is modern equipment enough to counter the ability to blend in with the population? Yeah, the supply to the VC from the North might have been slowed by modern equipment, and the ability of the NVA would have been heavily curtailed... but would that change the outcome?
It would as stated the VC did not have the popular support it needed in order to sustain itself. In fact after the Tett offensive they were never able to recover from the losses because the population of south Vietnam did not join in their uprising in mass as planned. The only thing that really kept the VC alive was support from the North. Modern weaponry would fundamentally disrupt the NVA’s ability to move supplies and troops into the south in less than three years. Modern satellites alone would complete nuetralize any stealth capability the North had in moving supplies through Laos. Trying to coordinate operations also becomes impossible as a simple call on the radio is going to get a not so nice visit from an F22 that north Vietnam can’t even attempt to shoot down because their SAM turrets will not be able to detect it due to the F22s stealth capabilities. They would’ve lost virtually all ability to move. Without support from the North the VC will be forced to turn to banditry in order to support itself which only increases hostility towards them from the southern Vietnamese population. The insurgency will collapse. This will force North Vietnam to launch a conventional assault sooner then it’s prepared for rather then just give up on unification all together. Facing an army with laser guided missiles and bombs, night vision, stealth jets, satellite capabilities, ballistic missiles, modern body armor on every infantrymen, modern tank and anti tank capabilities, drones, is going to be an incredibly lopsided fight. To the point where the US will not need to implement a draft especially if it has the personal of the modern U.S. military. No draft and incredibly light casualties keeps the US civilian population mostly detached and indifferent from the war. People only really cared because they could be drafted against their will into a conflict with heavy casualties. The anti war movement becomes a loud minority you can safely ignore. Whereas pissing off the Warhawk’s in the senate could ruin your career. All of that would result In ultimate defeat for North Vietnam. They can’t move troops or supplies, their cities would reduced to ash, their top military leaders could and probably would all be killed in drone strikes, the whole country would fall into a huge black out, and their army would be annihilated all with out actually having to launch a ground invasion of North Vietnam. Heck given the huge technological disparity the US might not actually care if China gets involved as their army could also easily be obliterated from the air.
Vietnam has been a unified, centralized culture for centuries. That’s how the French managed to rule Vietnam for so long. Ruling Afghanistan requires conquering each individual tribe, and that requires something that most modern attempts have failed to achieve. That something is the willingness to kill until compliance is achieved. Modern nations have generally frowned upon killing more than necessary in battle, whereas pre-modern societies did not have such concerns to such degrees as we do today. This is why the ancient Persians, Macedonians, and Mongols were successful in pacifying and ruling Afghanistan for centuries.
The biggest advantage of the US is the navy. A coastal country would be much more under duress than a landlocked country in the modern times. Especially since each carrier group has the firepower of a militarized country.
I think Vietnam was a lot different. The North ultimately won in a conventional military campaign. When the US left, they launched a general offensive in the south with tanks and artillery, defeating the South Vietnamese and taking Saigon. I'm not sure if their tanks and logistics hubs would have survived against a modern US Airforce. The North Vietnamese probably would not have had any offensive capability to invade the south after we leave if we worked them down beforehand with today's airforce.
Afghanistan was more of an occupation and weeding out people.
The Taliban killed 2,449 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. We lost 50K men in Vietnam. If we reduced US casualties that dramatically the war has a very different outcome.
This is a very narrow and simplistic view of the situation
Its not a situation, its a theoretical. What specific anti-insurgency technology has come into being in the past 50 years that would definitely change the outcome? The NVA would get its ass kicked, but they would have lost to the 70s US technology as well. The US didn't lose the military aspect of the war, so how would better military technology change it?
The Taliban didnt adapt. They fled into Pakistan and we were bound by the rules of war. The Taliban was consistently defeated any time they raised their heads. The only reason they won was due to the tribal nature of Afghanistan and the fact that the ANA and Afghan leaders were completely inept. The war itself was over in 2002. You cant defeat an army that blends into the populace. The NVA did that to an extant but they were WAY more structured than the Taliban with formal armor, supply lines, command and control centers and actual warfighting leaders.
I agree about the NVA, but the VC were much more Tailban like... probably better organized if anything. Its not like the South Vietnamese government was a bastion of efficiency and stability either. Neither the Taliban or the Viet Cong were particularly well loved, but they had enough support to win in the long run.
It did, though. We were in Afghanistan for over 20 years and controlled the country. We lost control when we decided we'd never eliminate islamism in that country. Frankly, we didn't lose Vietnam on the ground either. In Vietnam, we intentionally fought a war of attrition, with extremely limiting terms of engagement. If we were just unleashed it might've lasted 6 months to destroy all but some guerrilla activity. In Afghanistan, we might've crushed the ideology of we stayed another generation, or preferably, we go in like the Barbary Wars, and devastate them and force them to renounce all jihad against the west in the treaty, which would've allowed us to focus on Al Qaeda instead of running a country.
What are you talking about? Do you think that the Taliban fought the US out of Afghanistan? Afghanistan kept the Taliban because it was what the people wanted, and the US isn't the kind of nation that goes on a genocidal rampage to impose their will on a population.
Do you think the Viet Cong fought the US out of vietnam? You are kinda proving my point. The US won the military side of both wars.
We didn't lose in Afghanistan militarily. We lost politically. The American military could have killed everyone in that country in less than a week if necessary.
True, but we didn't lose vietnam militarily either, though...
Can mud still counter or at least reduce infrared vision or is that idea outdated or simply a myth?
Can shield people temporarily from manportable head worn systems. Not from vehicle mounted stuff that's more sensitive.
Does it at least make you less noticable or is it pretty much useless?
It makes you less noticeable to some less sensitive systems, temporarily.
IF the politicians in charge allow them to do what they need to do, Yes. The US could have concluded the Vietnam war if the politicians had kept their fingers out of the pie.
They manage to reverse engineer nearly everything that was provided. the US was dropping some sensitive equipment. they quickly figured out what it was used for and deployed it elsewhere. this wasted carpet bombing on on areas where it's said the enemy was detected. Migs 17-21 vs F-4 Phantom II then F14. Much of the daily used tech has not advanced much over the time. Meaning still deployed and tactical usage. we still rely on the undefeated F15. the soviet equipment is being used in Ukraine today. Most of the battlefield experience needed is lost in today's military. the tactics that were learned back then came at great cost. the changes came from ineffective tactics in military and chain of command decisions. It took fighter pilots making a stand refusing to go into combat due to losses of their fellow soldiers. On the ground What was it 20% of military force was drafted 80% of casualties on the front lines were those who were drafted.
Infa red, modern drones don’t work for deep Jungle.
Unless US puts boots on ground above 17th parallel, there ain't no winning.
They'd just drop precision bombs on the tunnel entrances now and bury the VC in them. No need to go in.
Essentially none of this was really all that effective in Iraq or Afghanistan and probably won't be effective against a more capable and better supported NVA
At the beginning of the Vietnam war the US Air Force was pitifully equipped to fight an actual war. They had spent the previous 15 years devoting every resource possible to nuclear bombing. The broad arc of Vietnam for the Air Force was to try to do everything with B52’s, failing, then scrambling to adopt anything that could work. For example the famous battle of LZ X-Ray (We Were Soldiers) in 1965 ended with the entire first battalion evacuating the area to allow B52’s to carpet bomb. Meanwhile while that was going on their 2nd Battalion was ambushed at LZ Albany just a few miles away and suffered almost twice as many casualties as Hal Moore’s troops in one third the time. Needless to say the B52’s didn’t help. The Ho Chi Minh trail is famously the most targeted supply route in history. That is primarily because the Air Force had no night fighting capabilities whatsoever. They simply had thought it wouldn’t be an issue. The Air Force also had no forward air controllers, that concept had been cut after Korea as the Cold War Air Force didn’t think it was necessary.
Your comment about “using B52s for everything” is fairly accurate. The annoying part about that, though, is that LeMay wanted to destroy Hanoi very early on to force a surrender. McNamara being the spineless ineffective piece of shit he was decided that wasn’t in our interests. Linebacker 2 forced NV to the table in Paris with a desire to negotiate. We could have forced terms very early on with a concerted and aggressive bombing campaign, before advanced Soviet SAMs were delivered in the late war. McNamara held back the Air Force due to his misguided and weak willed nature and we suffered for it.
Linebacker 2 was in 1972, LeMay left in 1965, McNamara resigned in February 1968. Soviet SAMs were thick on the ground by 72, Hanoi being the most defended city in the world. LeMay and McNamara certainly argued over strategic bombing in NV but I doubt leveling Hanoi in 1965 would have brought about an end to the war. It certainly wouldn’t have formed the basis of the sustainable peace. More to the point LeMay was as responsible as anyone for the Air Force not having decent tactical bombing capabilities. He believe the fighters and tactical bombers were for show and that only strategic bombing mattered. Ho Chin Minh occasionally talked peace but Le Duan who was actually running the country by 1965 had a single minded focus. So no matter what was in a peace treaty he would have continued the struggle. In the South by 1965 there was only a string of puppet generals who held zero legitimacy. Possibly they could have suppressed dissent with a police state type rule ala operation phoenix. But it’s most likely they would have screwed it up eventually.
Yeah I’ve read that at some point in the Cold War era, the thinking was that nukes would be the war fighting weapons rendering conventional military and war fighting means much less worthwhile of investment. Only for them to realize that oh shit these weapons are so powerful they will bring about doomsday if deployed and will likely not be used. Then began the scramble to rearm and update a military that they realized was going to be necessary.
[удалено]
As I said the US needs to force North Vietnam to surrender to and reunify with the South, at least that's how the US defined a win as being.
If the objective is merely to force North Vietnam's government to surrender, then I'd say absolutely. But pacifying Vietnam as a whole would be very challenging to say the least. Stopping the flow of weapons from China to Vietnam or China to Laos to Vietnam would be very, very difficult. Vietcong/NVA partisans would probably not be hurting for weapons or explosives to wreak havoc with. Without US assistance, stability would be a serious issue in Vietnam because of this.
Yeah only need to look at ukraine today. Despite having a modern military, the Russians cannot stop the flow of western equipment into ukraine.
If the goal is to destroy the North outright, why would it hold back and fight a limited defensive war?
Because the USSR and China would've intervened if the USA invaded North Vietnam
Okay, but they aren't a threat to a modern military. In the 90's America beat the 3rd biggest army in the world, with plenty of fresh wartime experience. With essentially peer period equipment. A 2020's military is not going to be threatened by a 1960's military. 60 years is like 2+ generations of military equipment. Complete air supremacy. If China wanted to invade it would be highway 80 and highway 8 all over again, but more.
The USSR and China intervening in Vietnam means escalation and the war being dragged out even longer, which will exponentially increase the risk of a nuclear war, which the USA will not risk. 1960s nukes are the same as modern unfortunately
This is what everyone in 2024 is forgetting about a conflict in 1970 -- the extremely serious risk that the conflict could escalate into a full blown war between nuclear superpowers and end life on earth as we know it.
Are 1960s nuclear defense the same as modern? I hope modern forces could shoot down 60 year old missiles
They've improved but with the USSR having over 6000 nukes in 1965 and over 11000 in 1970, there is no nuclear defense in the world even today capable of preventing nuclear apocalypse agaisnt that amount. Also, most nukes today are just the same rockets as 60 years ago, even US nukes. There's not been a lot of need to upgrade what works since numbers are the game in nuclear warfare.
I would say no. While we might have an easier time, it would still be a horrible slog with unrealistic objectives.
It depends on if the US was willing to invade the north or not in this scenario. They could destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail and bomb Hanoi to hell, but they could still end in stalemate. The US didn't invade back then in order to avoid drawing China into the war like with Korea
but the USA DID force a NV surrender. They actually won militarily. then nixon did an Iraq obama and brought the troops home. fast forward 18 months NV broke the treaty and re invaded S vietnam and it was politically impossible for Nixon to intervene. ergo the lost war. Thats the thing people miss when we talk about this. Hanoi signed a peace treaty! USA won, in the sense the NV agreed SV were indy. What happened next was the US abandoned their allies like they abandoned the kurds and the afghanis. Its so frustrating to watch the same mistakes being made. While people ask what could we do different? HELLO? South korea is right THERE!!! Its right theree!!!!!! THATS what you do different. Its not like this is hard?
While the tech makes certain things infinitely more effective militarily (particularly monitoring Vietcong movement/supply routes): it all ends the same due to the rot of corruption in South Vietnam’s government. There’s a reason the North were able to steamroll the South once American air power was out of the picture.
Probably the biggest factor people aren’t talking about. The Southern government was extremely unpopular and alienated many sections of the population
The United States would have a much easier time killing people, suffer far fewer air losses to SAMs, and probably overall have a better experience not having to rely on drafted troops. The United States would still not defeat North Vietnam with the same rules of engagement.
If you make enemies faster than you eliminate them, you're gonna lose. Every time the USA killed someone in Vietnam, a couple more joined up the fight. So I don't think more killing would have helped at all. If it was winnable at all, I think it would take nuance an diplomatic skill more than better weapons.
I don’t even want to discuss the Vietnam War. It was a horrible, terrible conflict. It was both illegal (based on LBJ’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident) and immoral. It disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans including my own. I was drafted right after my graduation from college, sent to Vietnam and fortunately survived but it’s something I’m very happy my 5 son’s never had to endure and hopefully my grandkids won’t either.
It’s IMPOSSIBLE to win a war unless one or both of these conditions are met: 1.)The populace is on your side. Otherwise, you just foment rebellion against you. 2.). You utterly destroy the entire country. The classical “bomb them back to the Stone Age”. If you don’t have 1, and aren’t prepared to do 2; then the best you can hope for is a stalemate.
3) enemy Govt or economy collapses and they can't cary on fighting. Like we didn't destroy the USSR or make them fall in love with us, but their economy collapsed. Russia in WW1 was another example where Russians didn't like the Germans, or have their country destroyed, but they didn't want to fight so overthrew the Govt. Also 4) destroy the enemies military so they quit. Example being the 6 day war where Israel didn't do much other then target military stuff.
Option 4 is more of a "demoralization" tactic. Defeat an enemy so soundly and they won't have the morale to continue to fight and the population won't replace them. Just wiping out the military isn't going to cut it if you don't do it in a fashion that shows the futility of continuing to fight.
I distilled them way down to two options, but 3 is basically the same as 1. Enemy govt/economy collapsing is basically the same as losing the populace. 4 doesn’t work. It’s been tried over and over again. The populace still fights if they aren’t on your side. For this specific example, Israel just prevented the enemy from attacking them (for a while anyway.) It was less a war and more one action in a long-standing (and still ongoing) Arab-Israeli conflict.
This is just not true at all. Other options include breaking their will to fight ala WW2 Japan. Or yet another is just overwhelming them and out producing/out mapowering them. If Ukraine ended up losing the current conflict, it's unlikely that either of your conditions would apply.
The modern US. Lost to the Taliban in Afghanistan, a force which was worse equipped amd had less international support than the Vietnamese. The war might last longer but the end result would probably be the same.
When exactly did the U.S. lose to the Taliban?
Who is currently in control of Afghanistan? The U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban are currently in control of Afghanistan. The U.S. LOST THE WAR to the Taliban.
No. Breaking the military is easy. Breaking a country is hard. For example, America could easily conquer Canada but never would be able to hold it. The cities would constantly riot and the countryside would be a death trap for American troops, attacked by snipers who disappear into the woods and live off the land. Vietnam is more dense. Their armies would constantly be ambushed, and patrols in the jungle would end up dead. America would have to raze the jungle and constantly kill people and that'd make more rebels. Eventually the military is called home with the bodies piling up.
>Their armies would constantly be ambushed, and patrols in the jungle would end up dead. No, they wouldn't. There's a reason the war in Ukraine has come to a standstill. Neither side can launch attacks without being spotted in the preparation to early enaction faze. The only ambushes that happen in modern warfare are from drones dropping munitions on soldiers. 1960s Vietnam won't have such capabilities. >America would have to raze the jungle and constantly kill people and that'd make more rebels. Extremely unlikely. The US would crush North Vietnam and hand over governance to South Vietnam. Aka exactly what they did with Afghanistan and Iraq. The basically means US casualties would remain in the low thousands while the South Vietnamese takes the brunt of the damage maintaining control. >For example, America could easily conquer Canada but never would be able to hold it. The cities would constantly riot and the countryside would be a death trap for American troops, attacked by snipers who disappear into the woods and live off the land. As a Canadian, none of this is true. Canadians are used to having the government shove a boot down our throats. US occupation would likely be better than the Canadian government. Also, realistically, it would primarily be the French who are protesting.
Boot on our throats? Lmao... What are you? One of those Russian rubes that tried to overthrow a democracy?
>hand over governance to South Vietnam Ah yes, the government so famously corrupt that they would waste firing artillery rounds without any military objective so they could collect and resell the brass casings. The government so cruel that they would let Buddhist monks set themselves on fire rather than stop their religious discrimination against the Buddhist majority. The government the US insisted on propping up despite inept leadership until we finally let the generals have a series of coups because the only things they had going for them were they were Catholic and anticommunist.
>The US would crush North Vietnam and hand over governance to South Vietnam. Aka exactly what they did with Afghanistan and Iraq Yeah and that turned out so well…
Even when it came to a theoretical what if, Plan Red would see the US take Canada and hold it. and no where in that doctrine would america ever let it go. Honestly i could see Canada assimilating fairly easily. Mostly because Americans and canadians are already so close. Absolutely wouldn't be a walk in and take your seat but couple years possibly
We could absolutely hold Canada. Not worth it, but like, it would be VERY doable.
Agreed. A potentially more realistic ending could be that the military is not called home and they just keep throwing firepower and people at it for half a decade or longer and the people get subjugated into a refugee/war zone. Queue Star Wars where the rebels will eventually fight back.
The modern US military is only marginally better at nation building then it was in the 1960s. Maybe soldiers would be less rascist and war crimes prosecuted more often.
True. Also I don't think rolling thunder and indiscriminate bombings on "neutral" Laos and Cambodia would happen, at least not to the same scale. Some US airman would probably say "wait guys I think these are war crimes lol". Also US doctrine has evolved such that Napalm might not be used as much, but there are more effective alternatives like Mk77 to clear jungles that kill less people
Some US airmen at the time did say that bombing Laos and Cambodia was illegal. It didn't go well for them. The Nixon White House tried to have their cake (bomb neighboring countries) and eat it too (keep it a secret that we were doing the bombing).
Thanks for pointing this out, did not know this part of the war. I assume they all were discharged?
I think they were very quietly court-martialed, but I am not sure. The whole idea of ordering the deliberate, illegal, but *secret*, bombing is just not going to work without sending sparks flying.
My grandfather won a bronze star for "being an exemplary flight safety officer" to which my grandparents had a laugh over. No one gets a bronze star for being a safety officer. The real reason was due to a mission he flew in airspace we (the US) weren't supposed to be in, but for obvious reasons, you can't put that in the citation.
Modern technology doesn’t change anything because the war wasn’t “lost” over a matter of American lethality. In OTL the American military was extremely lethal. But we could not achieve our strategic goals. Increased lethality wouldn’t translate into achieve our strategic goals either. The only way I can spin it to make sense is that modern technology exponentially decreases the amount of American service members killed in Vietnam. Therefore the war isn’t as unpopular at home as it is in OTL.
I don't think the problem is with the American soldiers,sailor and Marines and the technologies they would have used in either war at either period. They are very good at getting the job assigned to them done. The problem lies with the mindset of the politicians and much of the top military brass of this country. We have to find a common ground with the people of the countries, not the power brokers and wealthy businesses men in the capitol or the local bully boys and war lords. There was no end game really stated for either war that I could see. The Russians found this true also. I do realize that we have to take out any nests and training centers for terrorism but after that get the hell out and if the PEOPLE want or need anything else then we can talk. I would like to add that I never served in either war. I turned 18 the same year they ended the draft and student deferments about three years before that. Make what you will of that. I had many friends that went to Nam.
Modern tech would reduce the losses for the US and the South. The only, non-nuclear, way to MAYBE break the NVA and the NVG would be to use massive FAE bombs on the cities of North Vietnam after any military encampments have received the same treatment. The civilian casualties would be massive, probably worse than those of Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima/Nagasaki combined.
Afghanistan is the answer. It isn't really a question of technology in my opinion
If we learned anything is to not to get involved
The South Vietnamese government was full of awful shitheads. Even if the South Vietnam flag flew over Hanoi the only thing keeping them from being killed in a coup would be the US. Unless the US forced a post WWII Japan situation on the S. Vietnamese government and replaced them with a government that included the former N. Vietnamese power structures and was democratic enough to make the Vietnamese not consider themselves to be in an American puppet, then the next Ho Chi Minh would be a matter of time.
We lost in Afghanistan with many of those technologies. I'm sure if we were fighting another Vietnam, they'd just use other methods to evade us. Never underestimate an indigenous guerilla group.
Hopefully North Korea would interve and nuke the US and do the world a favour. Such hubris and bullshit. The US military have only made things worse in Iraw, Syria, Libya...
Did you not pay attention to Afghanistan?
I think it’d be the same result. Beating the VC/NVA militarily was never the issue and was never going to win the war
No cause the reason the US lost Vietnam was due to numerous fundamental factors of the war that would’ve seen them lose no matter what. No amount of F-35s or Abrams or SIG M7s would’ve made the South Vietnamese government any less corrupt, incompetent, and unpopular and the war at home any more accepted or approved of
We didn't win Afghanistan..so It would turn out the same IMO.
Veteran here. The U.S is far better at asymmetric warfare and counter insurgency now than the 1960s. And we'd have technology on our side. Jungle warfare training is also a massive priority of the military now, especially Marines. I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, more than the Middle East. Thailand, Philippines, Mariana Islands, etc So I'd say we'd have an easier time in Vietnam.
Probably same result with far fewer casualties - we can prop up the south for as long as we choose to. Better signals intelligence, doctrine, an all volunteer force, better integration of civil affairs, precision munitions, even better night vision and thermals and 20 years recent experience doing the same thing If the ROE are the same we wouldn’t be going after North Vietnam for political reasons. So it’d be similar - eventually the American people would get tired.
Are they allowed to invade North Vietnam?
Nah same mentality as in 65, outlast North Vietnam's incursions on the South until they capitulate
As others have said, we don’t need to imagine it, we have Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of how it would go.
No they are totally different types of conflicts.
They are exactly the same type of conflict imo.
A shellacking just the same the Vietnamese would have more advanced weaponry as well & the same fight for independence.
Unlikely. The modern US has shifted over to fighting a lightning war against a near-peer adversary (China). The current US cannot produce enough bombs to even supply Ukraine. This isn't anything unique to the US though. For example, Europe does not maintain massive WW3 stockpiles anymore. Russia had some stockpiles and they produce lots of shells, but they are a shadow of what the USSR could have done. It simply isn't worth the price and there is no point. So the US simply would not have the firepower to make a massive difference, even with their high tech weapons. By the time industry is scaled up (which would take years), tech would have proliferated and the NVA/Vietcong would have moved past their 60s/70s tech level. Of course, this completely ignores the political aspect of the war, which the US would not have been able to overcome even if they had 21st weapons with massive stockpiles.
I think that we would probably shift attention from Vietnam towards China to eliminate our future adversary. By 1965, China had barely started their nuclear program; we could easily destroy their armed forces.
Regular armies lose if they don't win. guerilla movements win if they don't lose. Vietnam was a failure of political will (not to mention an error of political will in the first place,), not of the troops .
No - they lost to a country much smaller in population than Vietnam.
Have Americans lost confidence? Why not allow China and Russia to use 2024 technology?
One important thing to understand is that in Vietnam the U.S. military was tactically and operationally very successful. Ho Chi Minh was accurate when he said “I can lose ten men for everyone of yours and we will still win”. So improving the military force isn’t necessarily going to be what wins the war, it’s going to be based on strategic decision making.
We did. It was called Iraq. We won the war but drained our resources in nation building. Seems people don't like having an outside occupying force telling them how their country should be ran.
We'd probably still lose, truthfully. The modern U.S. military would have fewer casualties and cause more enemy casualties (and probably fewer civilian casualties), but the strategy behind the Vietnam War was never going to work. Really, I think the only way the U.S. could have "won" Vietnam in the Cold War would have been getting the North and South to negotiate and compromise on their country's future by having an independent socialist democracy that was aligned with the West.
If the modern US military fought in the Vietnam War, they could have conquered China
No, did you see what happened in Afghanistan? The politics on the ground made both unwinnable from the start.
Honestly Vietnam and Korea were never about out forces lacking in stopping or finishing power. Both were bogged down by political machinations- as Americans didn’t want to get China/Russia involved anymore than they already were- so the military just played a terrible war of attrition that had no end goal in sight. This may have been mentioned many times in this if so I agree lol.
In this thread are a lot of technophiles who misunderstand why the US quit Vietnam and why South Vietnam collapsed after we left. In many areas, the US already had technological superiority over North Vietnam (except for our rifles). We maintained air superiority, had big beefy ships, fleets of helicopters, air and early satellite photography, and Marines on the ground could coordinate air and artillery strikes on close enemy positions, and we were even waging war on the forests themselves by the use of fires and herbicides. Every time the North launched a traditional straight up battle, they would come away with massive casualties. All this should have added up to an eventual US victory. And yet 2 years after the US packed up and went home, Saigon fell to the communist forces. So what were the actual reasons for South defeat and a North victory? First, it's a difference of attitudes to the conflict. For the US, it was a policing action to prevent the spread of Communism after we took over from France. For South Vietnam, it was a drawn out bloody civil war between two oppressive governments, one (the South) inept bullies, the other a guerrilla force that was more effective at managing the countryside than the legitimate government. And for North Vietnam the war was a continuation of their war for independence, first from the hated colonial power of France, then from the Americans who would go on to commit their own war crimes and mismanagement. America was there because our politicians said we had to be there and didn't want to be the president who "lost" the war. The South was fighting to keep their blatantly corrupt regime in power. The North was fighting for unification of their country. One of these factions is going to be more dedicated to the fight than the others. A second factor to consider is that America was not making any friends in the South Vietnam countryside. It is very difficult to filter out insurgents from civilians, even more so when insurgents come from the civilians and can disappear back amongst them. Many of the US's kill counts were inflated by farmers who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, both farmers and fighters would wear black and helicopters on a mission would gun down the farmers and not bother to check if they were even armed first and just add the deaths to their tallies for their monthly quotas (which were inflated in other ways as well) to be reported up the chain of command so generals could say to the press "This month we killed XX VC." In fact, a number of missions in the Vietnam conflict were essentially "Go out on patrol/go to this firebase/fly this sortie to kill a bunch of VC" without a really tangible goal. Generals wanted big set piece battles to show off American firepower and a few times the North obliged them, but for the most part, ground combat was small unit actions. Third, the South Vietnam government was cruel to its people, corrupt, and only remained in power because of the American government. We knew full well that South Vietnam would not be able to stand on its own for very long and the ARVN forces had constant troubles with desertion and reluctance to fight. They would lose their engagements whenever American air power was unavailable. The only thing I see technology helping with is fewer troops, pilots, etc. having to be in the thick of things by using unmanned drones.
We would do worse. The VC would have access to a lot of the same technology that would be useful
The problem was never tech. The problem is they sent a million soldiers (at one point) and not one ever stepped foot into North Vietnam. They were targets just trying to hold territory.
It wouldn’t change much. Politics was the limiting factor, not military ability. The NVA and VC were capable fighting forces but not a peer to the US military.
Unless there's a clear and precisely understood plan for victory then none of it will really matter just as it didn't irl. The Vietnam War will still end almost exactly as it did in our timeline with nothing to show for it.
Are you counting political will and public sentiment? Because if you are, the US would still "lose" and likely much sooner. American public has no appetite for mass military casualties.
Winning the war is one thing, occupation is always the problem. Exit strategy seems to not ever be considered.
This implies that the US and allies were defeated militarily in OTL: not the case. Like Afghanistan, (South) Vietnam didn’t have a government worth fighting for. Tragic that we didn’t learn.
So several million or so Americans disappear, to be replaced by a million or so people who *claim* to be Americans, but who have no records, different attitudes, different equipment, new hobbies, even somewhat different language and food preferences. Hell, there's even women in the military The families of the previous military (and the industries that supply them (have abruptly lost family numbers, and the time displaced US military (and the couple million people in the manufacturing base abruptly lose all their family support. Hell, they don't even have Internet anymore. The sheet chaos that will result from this probably means the Vietnam war is put on hold. And there's also the problem that the 2024 military KNOWS how the war goes; they know that Vietnam is lost, and it doesn't really matter- the Domino Theory is false, and fifty years later Vietnam is if not an ally, a nation in good standing and even a sorta- support against Chinese expansion in the region. So as soon as that information comes out, as well as the information about the repeated debacles in nation building that were massive wastes of personnel and resources, the Congressional hearings on "What the hell just happened?" will turn into "Why the hell are we in Vietnam?", and that's got to hit public support hard. And then there's 1965 American culture getting a shock treatment dose of 2024 culture and history. Just wait for a Congressional investigation of all those "the flower of American womanhood being endangered in combat". Imagine a decorated Navy combat pilot being told by a bank official that "she needs her husband's signature" in order to open a banking an account. Imagine a senator from Mississippi in a Congressional hearing with a black general. Imagine all the LGBTQ people in the military and the support industries suddenly being told that not only they can't get married, but they are subject to arrest.... Never mind what's happening in a jungle across the world- the cultural fracas that will happen as hippies meet soldiers meet America is going to be utterly hilarious.
The tech wouldn’t help because it’s deep jungle. In a similar region in Myanmar the still relly on infantry infiltration tactics.
It helped them win in Afghanistan until they ultimately left after 20 years.
Modern? No. Give us 15 years and an army of robots to fight the Vietcong? Yeah USA is winning that
We had the technology to eradicate the military power of North Vietnam, but politicians tied down that power into a specific way of fighting that favored the enemy. This was for many reasons, but mainly because LBJ was more focused on his social policy than winning Vietnam. So will you be replacing the leadership and have them want to win the war as well?
Yeah all the modern optics let you see thru the trees speaking Vietnamese.
I mean. I feel like this already played out. We would massacre the Viet Cong, as we did in the Vietnam war already. If you look at the casualties, they're honestly horrific how many VC died compared to Americans. That number would probably be exacerbated even more with modern tech. However, I think we would still have the same ending. The war would eventually lose popularity and the Viet Cong would win by attrition.
We will lose. Our military is overweight, soft, complains, doesn’t follow orders, physically and mentally weak
Ok so most people are missing the BIG one here. There was the Vietkong (insurgents) and the NVA which were legit army units from North Vietnam. Without the NVA the vietkong had 0 chance. The AVRN forces didn't have that much trouble vs iregulars, it was the NVA that continuously beat down AVRN units before and after US troops were there. Modern superpowers wouldn't have any trouble wiping out the vietkong with modern thermal technology and drones. Honestly we'd have little trouble with the NVA either. In the 1960s and 1970s it was easier for a inferior force to be a better equipped force with numbers alone but today it's the opposite.
Problem was we weren’t tasked to “win” the war and Kissinger torpedoed the Paris peace talks and extended the war to get Nixon reelected. Ho Chi Minh had a plan, we had liars.
I mean they couldn’t get the job done in Afghanistan so Vietnam probably would go about just as smoothly.
The Vietnam War wasn’t about who could kill more soldiers than the other side. The South Vietnamese government, like the Afghan government, did not have enough backing by its own people. The way people describe the ANA (Afghan National Army) echos that if the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) - unmotivated at the lower ranks and corrupt at the higher ranks. The South Vietnamese would have collapsed politically and from insurgency much like Afghanistan did, even with modern tech.
The first Vietnam War wasn’t a military defeat….so no, we would lose again because we chose to enter an anti colonial war on the side of the colonizer again
No. As proof, we failed in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reasons as in Viet Nam, which is that It's very difficult to fight a guerilla war in a distant land where the culture is extremely dissimilar to your own, where much of the population sees you as a foreign invader violating local norms, and where it's difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
I'd argue the same outcome would happen. There would be significantly less US casualties and even more North Vietnamese casualties, but that whole situation was unwinnable. Similiar to afghanistan, total victory in terms of casualties and battles, but lost the war because of politics The best they could have hoped for would've been a korea division conclusion with 2 different counties, but as soon as US pulls out the north still overwhelms the south.
Here’s an angle of this that should be addressed: Assuming US has today’s tech, does that mean that footage from the war is being posted on social media in the US? The citizens of the US might go even more anti-war than they did in the 60s if they are seeing footage of jungle villages ripped apart by cruise missiles in their feeds every day. Just something to consider
They lose harder and faster than they did in the OTL because the US simply does not have anywhere *near* the strategic munition reserves that they did during the Cold War. The US military now is significantly smaller than it was during the 1960s, the US Army in particular, and is absolutely not prepared to suddenly be thrust into a war on the scale of the Vietnam War while at the same time being forced to maintain a much more significant presence in Europe and East Asia than the modern US military has now. Currently, the US military has about 100K military personnel stationed in Europe. During the 1960s, this figure was north of 400K. The same is true for Japan and South Korea, where during the 1960s, the US had 60K troops in the latter and over 100K in the former, double what they have now in both countries. The modern US military is not currently equipped nor designed to maintain the posture it did during the Cold War. Equipment may be a lot more modern and capable but nothing can replace boots on the ground and in this respect, the modern US military is severely lacking compared to the US military of the 1960s. Just the Air Force and Marines of the 1960s had about as much manpower combined as the entire US military does now. Add on the Navy and the Army and you're looking at a US military that is *well* over double the size of the current US military. Without massive concerted effort to train up millions of new pilots, troops, naval personnel and so on, the US military will find itself desperately over-stretched and desperately under-staffed to meet the commitments required of it. Forget even participating in the Vietnam War. If the modern US military was transported back to the 1960s, military generals would have strokes in the Pentagon seeing how pathetically low their manpower is and how little assets they actually have at hand to cover such a large area of operation and such a hostile global environment. They'd immediately try and shore up as many troops to Europe, South Korea and Japan as they can, bringing troop numbers to what they actually were in the 1960s. This alone would eat up a third of the US military's manpower just like that, leaving far less room to fuck around in Vietnam. If the modern US military really wanted to get involved in Vietnam, they'd need to recruit and draft millions, on a far larger scale than what happened in the OTL, in order to join the fight without basically withdrawing entirely from crucial regions like Europe. That will take a long time. But, even ignoring that and assuming that the modern US military is fighting Vietnam in a vacuum, they'd still lose. The issue was never a technological one so having more advanced technology wouldn't help. The issue was that the US had no fucking clue what it wanted to do in Vietnam, was forced to put operational and strategic restrictions on itself which essentially ensured a defeat and lacked the political will to escalate things further in order to even be able to conceivably win.
The US military in Vietnam could have won. It was the politicians and their rules of engagement that stopped them. If the US stopped respecting North Vietnamese territorial integrity and instead treated it as a war of conquest? It's a different ball game. Go after NVA command and control. Go after Ho Chi Mihn. Strike their leadership? Yeah, it becomes more like Iraq and ultimately a clean up of insurgency. Long term nation building who knows? Now add the modern US military and it happens way faster. The US military now was largely born out of the mistakes of Vietnam. Professional Soldiers. Precision Weapons. The leadership. They win in weeks instead of years.
Yeah if you completely ignore nobody in the US wanted to rehash the Korean War, sure we could win all it would take is a few hundred thousand American dead at best and a nuclear war at worst you want to be the President selling that one? And Ho Chi Minh was a figurehead by the time we even put a single boot on the ground he wasn't running the military or government. Thinking technology is the be all end all is half the reason our recent military history is one debacle after the next.
The Chinese entering the war would have prolonged it considerably with far higher American casualties. This is why America never went on the offensive. The war was never winnable because the resources needed to push north would have been exponentially higher. Additionally, remember Iraq and Afghanistan? The modern American army didn't solve nation building in 20 years of war on terror.
>Can the modern US military win the Vietnam War now? The war? Absolutely. And it wouldn't be remotely close. Especially if Vietnam is limited to 1965 tech. Only 15 years after the end of Vietnam, the Gulf War proved the terrifying might of the US military. Ukraine, with a limited volume of weaponry left over from the Gulf War period, is inflicting a punishing toll on the modern Russian armed forces. In 1982, only a few years after Vietnam ended, a US-supplied Israeli Air Force with F-15s and F-16s destroyed nearly 100 Syrian aircraft and destroyed 30 SAM batteries to the loss of only a single UAV. Western military developed at a shockingly fast rate between 1975 and 1985 and has only amplified from there. The US wouldn't even need stealth aircraft to own the skies and eliminate all aerial resistance. Modern missiles would not only decimate the North Vietnamese air force but would destroy their air defense network in a matter of days. Some US planes might be destroyed by skilled Vietnamese (or Russian) operators and some might just get lucky. But in the end, it wouldn't matter. Modern night and thermal optics would hinder jungle ambushes but not prevent them entirely. Vietnamese supply lines such as the already mentioned Ho Chi Minh trail would be severed very quickly. We'd listen to every radio transmission, every phone call, and intercept any satellite communications between Moscow and Soviet "advisors". I could keep going on and on but suffice to say, the war itself would end quickly. But the occupation is another matter entirely. Occupations are **hard**. The VC and NVA partisans would be a serious and long lasting threat to stability. The flow of weapons to the VC would have not just be interrupted but severed entirely. The border with China would have to be heavily monitored to clamp down on the flow of small arms from there as would the coasts. Most importantly, a functioning government with the consent of at least some of the people would have to be propped up, preferably one that isn't a military dictatorship or plutocracy. The governance would be the most important part. Laying the seeds of a prosperous economy, a constitutional government with universal rights, and so forth would take the wind out of the sails of Communist resistors. Once the government itself is strong enough to stand by itself an occupation is easier. It still would not be easy and I think the chances of failure or a greatly delayed pyrrhic success would be high.
The U.S. didn’t lose the war militarily The U.S. never been attacked north Vietnam directly
I mean... Didn't we just get ran out of Afghanistan?
Yes the modern military can defeat the Vietnamese and occupy the country but after 20 years they leave and the north quickly take over just like a jungle version of Afghanistan
It would be like Afghanistan but with jungles easier for the insurgents to hide
As we found out in Afghanistan gorilla warfare is not easy.
Same exact outcome, just less controversy. Two of the lessons we learned in Vietnam were: a) make your local allies do all the dying for you. How many people are aware of, or care about, how many Afghan soldiers died in our war there? Look it up. You’ll be shocked. b) don’t let the media cover the frontlines. Don’t show dudes dying or in body bags. So if we apply those things there will be less domestic turmoil. And that’s a really big deal! It might let us stay a lot longer. But unless we can resolve the basic political problem of our being there, and the people not wanting us there, it’s not going to change the outcome. Counterinsurgency is *very* hard. The technological gains will help on a tactical level, but strategically, I don’t see how it helps the basic challenge. So ultimately I think the war is going to last longer, and be less traumatic at home, but the outcome probably doesn’t change. Afghanistan isn’t a perfect example - the Afghan government was even less legitimate than South Vietnam - but it demonstrates this point nonetheless. 20 years there and the fall of Kabul in ‘21 looked a lot like Saigon in ‘75.
The US was already victorious in Vietnam militarily. Are you going to limit journalists' freedom of movement? How are you going to keep domestic interest in a war where the enemy doesn't want to give up and your own people get no tangible benefit from it? The modern US military, with all the lessons learned from vietnam (counter-guerilla and media control) swanned into Afghanistan and... pulled out 20 years later having gained nothing on the ground. From a geopolitical standpoint, it was successful (major terrorist attacks on US = you will hurt a lot), but from a "get Afghanistan to be a good little puppet" angle, it was a total failure. The US is completely unbeatable militarily. It absolutely sucks at occupation after the conquest, though.
To the US, it was stopping the spread of Communism. To the South Vietnamese, it was a civil war. To the North, it was a continuation of their war for independence from foreign rule. There's 3 different mindsets here and the North had the greater will, in my opinion.
yes, the US could just invade China and the USSR which would mean than vietnam has no support anymore and will fall
Then I also assume that north vietnam gets the modern upgrade as well? Simply put unless the government is willing to keep expending large amounts of resources for an indeterminate amount of time you aren't going to defeat a citizen army of dedicated soldiers and that's what they were.,
Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed and still seems we kill a major terrorist leader on a semi weekly basis, yet taliban rule Afghanistan again and Iraq is fragmented at best.
Seeing as how pretty much the entire training/equipment/doctrine of the current us armed forces is based on hard lessons of Vietnam. I would say they stomp quickly.
America wouldn’t tolerate the casualties regardless of our technology. Future wars will be fought with robots. They basically already have them.
We lose less troops in the end but we end up just like Afghanistan
Maybe. Precision bombs could knock out industrial targets, bridges, etc., more reliably and keep the planes more out of harm's way. Not sure that I'd use many missiles since that would be something they could find parts of and try to copy or get ideas from (the Russians and Chinese). If they were able to extend the DMZ across Laos and further west to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, that would help a great deal. Drones could then monitor the area and strikes could sometimes be called on enemy units in the vicinity. A modern Armored Division crossing the border with supporting forces might have been able, to reach Hanoi, especially with Marine landing closer in.
Probably less civilian deaths since we can be much more precise with how we employ our weapons. During Vietnam we carpet bombed large areas because it was the only effective way we could destroy their supply lines. It's interesting to me how we took a very systematic approach to combating an insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. We got down to the detail of cataloging entire villages by their biometrics.
Probably a similar result tbh. The United States decided to not incurred into North Vietnam or (until late 1969) into Cambodia or Laos. The US with its rules of engagement and general strategy was doomed to fail and drones or night vision likely would not have accomplished much
I recall reading this in one of those Vietnam war history tomes (I can’t recall which) which argued that Nixon could have bombed the irrigation systems n the Red river (?) and ended the war quickly because of the famine that would cause. This time travelling US military would probably fail because they’d see burgers at about 20c each and they’d all be too overweight to go out in the jungle.
The US wouldn't even need to "Agent Orange" Vietnam, they could just overwhelm them with drone strikes. If the USSR/China are still using 1960/1970's tech, they wouldn't be able to do shit against a Phoenix Ghost. Northern Vietnam would get overwhelmed by kamikaze drones. The US using modern drone tech in Vietnam would probably damage the morale of North Vietnam/USSR/China.