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Vietnam War
Although the Cold War was the dominant feature of the post-1945 world, another momentous change in the international system took place concurrently: the end of Europes five-century-long domination of the non-European world. Some one hundred new sovereign states emerged from the wreckage of European colonialism, and Cold War competition was promptly extended to many of these newstates.
The Vietnam War was the legacy of Frances failure to suppress nationalist forces in Indochina as it struggled to restore its colonial dominion after World War II. ... Vietnam had gained its independence from France in 1954. ...
The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and Chinese intervention against the United Nations in Korea made U. ... -China policy a captive of Cold War politics. ... American political and military leaders viewed the Vietnam War as the Chinese doctrine of revolutionary warfare in action (using Chinese and Soviet arms, to boot).
The overarching geopolitical aim behind the United States involvement in Vietnam was to contain the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. To accomplish this aim, the United States supported an anti-communist regime known as the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in its fight against a communist take-over. South Vietnam faced a serious, dual-tracked threat: a communist-led revolutionary insurgency within its own borders and the military power of its communist neighbor and rival, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). Preventing South Vietnam from falling to the communists ultimately led the United States to fight a major regional war in Southeast Asia. ... Whether the United States should have heavily committed itself militarily to contain communism in South Vietnam remains a hotly debated topic. ... The United States strategy generally proceeded from the premise that the essence of the problem in Vietnam was military, with efforts to "win the hearts and minds" of the South Vietnamese populace taking second place.
To frustrate North Vietnamese and Viet Cong efforts, and in part to "contain" China, the United States eventually fielded an army of over 500,000 men and engaged in extensive air and naval warfare against North Vietnam. ...
Allied forces in South Vietnam were never organized into a single combined command, but at lower levels many combined operations were conducted, with varying degrees of success. The war also demonstrated the advantages (and especially disadvantages) of tight operational control by the President, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense in Washington.
US involvement in Vietnam began during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961), which sent US military to South Vietnam. ... In 1957 Communist rebels -- Viet Cong -- began a campaign of terrorism in South Vietnam. They were supported by the government of North Vietnam and later by North Vietnamese troops. ... Kennedy (1961-1963) decided to commit American support troops to South Vietnam. ... Much of his time and energy would be taken up by the war in Vietnam. By early nineteen-sixty-four, America had about seventeen-thousand troops in Vietnam. ... Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, American divisions would seek out and destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (South Vietnamese Communist) formations, while air power carried the war to the North, attacking both the will of Hanois leaders to continue the fight and, to an increasing extent, their ability to do so. ... In theory, Westmorelands strategy of search and destroy would force the Communists to expend supplies and thus make the logistics establishment in North Vietnam all the more vulnerable to bombing.
In 1966, more than 200,000 troops were committed to Vietnam. The United States escalated its participation in the war to a peak of 543,000 troops in April 1969. American forces in Southeast Asia operated under some stringent restrictions, including being forbidden to invade enemy territory in North Vietnam and, for many years, likewise being barred from ground operations against enemy sanctuaries in bordering Laos and Cambodia. The "body count" of Vietcong killed was the centerpiece of the American approach to waging the war, conducted through search-and-destroy operations in remote jungle regions. ...
Vietnam saw changes in employment tactics of artillery. ...
The political challenge of the war stemmed from the belief of the rural Vietnamese that the Government of Vietnam will not stay long when it comes into an area, that the Government was indifferent to the peoples welfare, that the low-level officials were tools of the local rich; and that the Government was excessively corrupt from top to bottom. ...
In 1965, US air strikes were ordered against North Vietnam. By late 1965, such air strikes became part and parcel to daily activities of those stationed in Vietnam.
Approximate Word count = 3829
Approximate Pages = 15.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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