Hi Zen "Panther 35 in on the guns"
Quote Originally Posted by zenpundit View Post
You can only fight to the degree and for so long as you can afford to pay for the kind of fighting that you are doing. Different kinds of fighting incurs different sets of costs. Paying enormous costs for marginal strategic results is not "winning". Ignoring fundamental economic trade-offs in selecting military tactics and operational approaches is simply stupid. This is not an argument for doing nothing, but to do it with eyes open and with a long-term perspective.
So spend blood and treasure for little effect makes no sense? I agree. That's why I want effect over efficiency and not "cheap stuff" or "cost saving." The debate is what serves the purpose. Not what it costs.

Quote Originally Posted by zenpundit View Post
Would LBJ have withdrawn from the race for the presidency on March 1st or called a halt to bombing the enemy in order to seek a negotiated settlement? Johnson had called for a military victory in Vietnam, officially, only two and half years earlier.
Tet was significant. It did not loose the war, or even represent a turning point. It wasn't Kursk or Stalingrad. - and was the North better of with Nixon than LBJ?
Nixon entered office in January 1969 and started withdrawing troops by late summer. Richard Nixon never had any intention of winning the Vietnam War, though he'd liked to have seen GVN scrape by with some kind of independence, it was not a vital US national interest to him if it did (even less to Kissinger).
Nixon had a strategy, unlike LBJ. He was no less determined to "win."
Invading Cambodia or bombing North Vietnam was never used by Nixon to pursue a military victory but in context of gaining the upper hand in a negotiated settlement with Hanoi and triangulating secret diplomacy with Moscow and opening relations with Peking.,
Sorry but it was. It was instrumental in the coup in Cambodia and it knocked out all the major NVA base areas for two years. No single action did more military damage to the NVA than the Cambodian invasion. It was military action focussed on military forces, and yes it had strategic effect.

Watergate and the 73 Oil crisis doomed SVN greatly more than the very minor reversals of Tet five years before. - and ultimately, too many Americans died for no strategic goal the US was prepared to risk against China and the USSR.
Wars are not won and lost on CNN, or the front page of the New York Times.