![]() Being on the defensive meant that its opponents were able to dictate the pace of campaigning. In part, this was because it was having to respond to its opponents and had a large area to defend, but there was also a command culture focused on caution and firepower that could not grasp the dynamic of events. By 1963, there were 16,000 American military advisers in South Vietnam, but the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or the ARVN, was not in command of the situation. In turn, in a process that had begun before American intervention, and in a process encouraged by China, forces from North Vietnam moved south to help the Viet Cong. The American-supported government in South Vietnam faced a Communist rebellion by the Viet Cong, which led to more overt American intervention. Comparing Vietnam to contemporaneous conflicts in the Middle East, for example, can help both illuminate the details of Vietnam and also challenge claims about that conflict’s singularity. To understand the war better, it is important to place it in the broader geopolitical context of the late 1960s. All of these points had, and still have, considerable value, but none justifies the extent to which the Vietnam War, or rather this Vietnam war, dominates discussion, and notably so at the popular level. American failure also showed that nuclear capability reduced the significance of warfare, whether conventional or not. Although it could bring significant tactical and operational advantages, the Americans failed to use bombing to bring victory or, indeed, to direct the responses of the North Vietnamese, except for an investment in anti-aircraft capability. The Vietnam War led to much discussion of the merits and limitations of bombing to achieve strategic objectives. Moreover, American failure appeared to demonstrate that air power had not redefined warfare to the extent that its protagonists argued. As the war was also a failure for the United States, it was both analyzed there and attracted great attention elsewhere-being seen as an augury of a new age of warfare, that of revolutionary warfare, and more particularly as a victory for Maoist ideas of revolutionary violence and strategy, ideas contrasted with those of the Soviet Union. As the sole major televised ground-conflict during the Cold War, the war was extensively reported from on the ground, with print journalism supported by impressive photography, and was followed with great attention around the world, much of it critical. This was a lengthy conflict, one in which the United States, the world’s leading military power, was involved most intensively. The American image of land warfare during the Cold War as a whole is dominated by the Vietnam War for a number of reasons. Why? The analysis of the Vietnam War continues to be highly controversial and interacts with ongoing debates in the United States and elsewhere about how best to conduct military operations, and especially the inherent viability of guerrilla warfare and, conversely, of counterinsurgency strategies. As nuclear confrontation gave way to nuclear parity in the 1960s and early 1970s, limited war in Vietnam proved far less successful than in the Korean War less than 20 years before.
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