Vietnam Battefield Tactics

When you look at the United States and when they actually had ground battles with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong you would have to look no further then the year of 1965. “Before that time the Viet Cong focused their attention on the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces hoping that the attacks would defeat the RVAF before the Americans could deploy ground forces.” Once the American ground forces started to show up i

American strategy within South Vietnam focused directly on and around the employment of the United States ground troops. Westmoreland had devised a plan that was known as the three stages of employment. Looking at the first stage the American combat units would secure coastal base areas; during stages two and three they would conduct increasingly more extensive ground operations from bases in the interior. In a sense they wanted to put the squeeze down on any Viet Cong in South Vietnam by coming from the shore and interior and basically make a sandwich with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as the meat.

Military strategy is officially defined as “the art and science of employing the armed forces of a nation to secure the objectives of national policy by the application of force, or the threat of force.” Was this the main objective for the United States? “For the U.S. Army, the war in Vietnam presented a new type of battle fought with new weapons and new tactics against a very different enemy. In many respects, the area wars without front lines together with guerilla tactics were out of our nation’s beginnings, while the sophisticated hardware presaged the future automated battlefield management systems.” To attack a man and kill him, your best shot is to go for the heart. Looking at Vietnam and were their heart lays you can not but help to try to insert the sword in to the Ho Chi Minh trail, the heart of the supply line of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Ho Chi Minh trail couldn’t be taken only by air strikes, it needed to be attacked with ground forces head on. The heart of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese transported more then two million people during the war and forty-five million tons of material. “The only problem with trying to execute a battle plan on the Ho Chi Minh trail which always ran into an algorithmic error created by the inversion of the 1962 Laos Accords. As a result of the Accords the United States and North Vietnam reached a “tactic agreement” that North Vietnam would not launch ground attacks against western Laos so long as the United States did not launch ground attacks against the Laotian panhandle. This provided to be a massive failure in logic. Western Laos was strategically insignificant, but because of the Ho Chi Minh trail which ran its length the Laotain panhandle was what the military would call key terrain-terrain so important that it conveys a major advancement to its possessor.” With signing the Laos Accords one of the main tactics in the war was not allowed to take place, which was an error on the United States. This error not only guaranteed its own failure but also sealed the fate of its South Vietnamese ally as well.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong worked great together, knowing the limitations of their strengths, and finding one battle plan that can help them succeed in their ultimate goal of victory. The United States had a couple of advantages over the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, and that was the superior weapons and tactical men. The United States had a lot of distractions that they couldn’t overcome in the long run. One, they had a massive amount of generals that seemed to be confused on many different levels of the plan. When you take a group of men and they don’t know why they are fighting or a confused about the reason they were there it doesn’t help you in trying to win the war.

When American soldiers came in to contact with South Vietnamese soldiers there wasn’t a mutual respect from the Americans. What you have to look at here is that you are taking a world power army, and you are trying to combine it with the South Vietnamese soldiers. When you are a dominate rising country and you are working with a country trying to find an identity, you seem to have no patience with trying to work with the South Vietnamese, let alone taking orders from other generals that are not from your country. To whom would e

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