{"id":52830,"date":"2025-05-03T07:44:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-03T15:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=52830"},"modified":"2025-05-03T07:44:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T15:44:56","slug":"us-elites-learned-much-from-the-vietnam-defeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/03\/us-elites-learned-much-from-the-vietnam-defeat\/","title":{"rendered":"US Elites Learned Much From the Vietnam Defeat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Reprinted from <a href=\"https:\/\/bracingviews.substack.com\/\">Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>We just marked the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Did American officials learn anything from the disastrous Vietnam War?<\/p>\n<p>Of course they did. Just not the lessons you\u2019d have wished they\u2019d learned.<\/p>\n<p>So, what did they learn?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They learned that wars can indeed last forever, but that Vietnam wasn\u2019t the best \u201cforever war\u201d for the military-industrial complex because it became deeply unpopular and was disrupting cohesion within the military itself. The best forever wars are open-ended \u201cwars\u201d like the global war on terror. And perhaps a \u201cnew Cold War\u201d with Russia and\/or China. Wars that don\u2019t involve the deployment of over half a million men (unless that \u201cnew\u201d Cold War turns hot).<\/li>\n<li>They learned to control the narrative. No more journalists traveling freely in war zones as in the 1960s in Vietnam. Journalists are now most often embedded in U.S. military units. Embedded reporters, dependent on the military for access and protection, know what they can and can\u2019t say, even as they tend to sympathize with the troops they\u2019re with.<\/li>\n<li>They learned that forced conscription via a draft doesn\u2019t work well for unpopular wars. So they transformed the military into an \u201call-volunteer\u201d force. Draftees may well be resentful, rightly so, but volunteers? Too bad \u2013 they volunteered for this.<\/li>\n<li>Along with \u201cvolunteers,\u201d they learned to indoctrinate U.S. troops to be \u201cwarriors\u201d and \u201cwarfighters\u201d rather than citizen-soldiers. Warriors exist to fight wars, so shut up and blast away.<\/li>\n<li>They learned to keep the American people isolated from war and its deadly effects. Recall that under Bush\/Cheney, Americans weren\u2019t even allowed to see flag-draped caskets. During Vietnam, war was in America\u2019s living rooms during dinner, complete with body counts. Coverage of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere was sanitized, almost bloodlessly so.<\/li>\n<li>They learned never to talk of sacrifice (except by those volunteer warriors) by the American people. Taxes aren\u2019t raised in the name of war. There are no war bond drives. America\u2019s leaders tell the rest of us to enjoy life, to visit Disney and to go shopping, while \u201cour\u201d warriors fight overseas.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Together with those \u201clessons,\u201d they continue to preach \u201cpeace through strength,\u201d attacking those who truly seek peace as misguided (at best) and treasonous (at worst). As ever, they tend to attack those who\u2019d dare criticize the U.S. military as ungrateful backstabbers. And of course they consistently obscure the truth of how poorly wars like Iraq and Afghanistan were going while holding no one in the upper echelons responsible and accountable for rampant corruption and disastrous endings.<\/p>\n<p>All these \u201clessons\u201d ensured that Vietnam wouldn\u2019t be the last example of hubris, folly, and atrocity, and indeed it hasn\u2019t been. Until the right lessons are learned, expect future repeats, tragic variations on a theme of Vietnam.<\/p>\n<p><em>William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), professor of history, and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is <a href=\"https:\/\/bracingviews.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow external noopener noreferrer\" data-wpel-link=\"external\">Bracing Views<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. We just marked the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Did American officials learn anything from the disastrous Vietnam War? Of course they did. Just not the lessons you\u2019d have wished they\u2019d learned. So, what did they learn? They learned that wars [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-52830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"To them, the right lessons; to everyone else, the wrong ones"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52830"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52837,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52830\/revisions\/52837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52830"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=52830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}