Hi Zen "Panther 35 in on the guns"
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.
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 had a strategy, unlike LBJ. He was no less determined to "win."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).
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.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.,
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.
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