I think Goodhart's law gives us a good insight. If the actual goal was to ensure the long term viability of a democratic South Vietnam, the endeavor failed. So what happened, is that the US government "gamed" it by targeting "Body Count" and "winning all the battles." In doing so, it failed to achieve the actual goal in its long term interest.
Ahhh - thanks for getting to the crux of the matter:
The military objectives were 'gamed' by using 'body count' which mislead us in terms of progress.(Actually, they were not 'gamed' so much as the old metric of 'body count' was not useful in this type of insurgency - so more a matter of 'lack of insight').
BUT - the strategic objectives did not fail for this reason.
The military objectives of defeating the VC and North Vietnamese were still outright successful. Despite all the challenges, it was a definitive military victory for the US: VC wiped out, North Vietnamese totally neutralized. The North Vietnamese basically surrendered their objectives and a 'peace treaty' was signed.
The 'failure' in Vietnam was a geopolitical one - once the US withdrew, the North Vietnamese rebuilt their army and waltzed into the South.
My point is - the two are separate issues.
The now accepted view of 'body count was misleading' actually did not fundamentally affect military outcomes. It was a bad measure, but the US still one. It affected some things, maybe a 'shock' to public opinion, but it was not existential in terms of changing the military outcomes.
The 'failed objectives' were simply due to (arguably premature) US withdrawal. You can see from US casualties [1] during the war that the war was 'won' (about mid 1970) several years before US withdrawal and even longer before a resurgent North Vietnamese invasion after US withdrawal.
Hence the confusion.
There were so many civilian casualties, so many geopolitical bits of ugliness, the US casualty rate was high enough, the terrible massacres on both sides - that all of this leaves us with a clouded view of the events.
The now accepted view of 'body count was misleading' actually did not fundamentally affect military outcomes. It was a bad measure, but the US still [won]. It affected some things, maybe a 'shock' to public opinion, but it was not existential in terms of changing the military outcomes.
No, it was existential, because that shock to public opinion was a large part of the reason that the strategic goal was abandoned. The draft may have been a larger part, but the point remains: tolerating and perhaps even encouraging excessive civilian casualties was a military failure that played a role in the geopolitical failure. They are not separate issues at all.
BUT - the strategic objectives did not fail for this reason.
It's hard to quantify the cost of the bad PR that comes from killing children and grannies.
The military objectives of defeating the VC and North Vietnamese were still outright successful...The 'failure' in Vietnam was a geopolitical one
The programming objectives were successful...the startup's failure was an economic one. Right here, we go up one level of abstraction, and we see the more fundamental failure. Does it really matter how good the code was, if your company goes bankrupt?
My point is - the two are separate issues.
No. One is a means. It's a form of implementation. I should sincerely hope you aren't all about "art for art's sake" when the "art" in question is military action and deadly force. As for the 2nd thing -- the actual goal, living up to values -- that gets to the crux of the true failure.
The now accepted view of 'body count was misleading' actually did not fundamentally affect military outcomes. It was a bad measure, but the US still one. It affected some things, maybe a 'shock' to public opinion, but it was not existential in terms of changing the military outcomes.
I went to a military academy for a boarding school. I had a 1903 Springfield rifle (disabled) locked to a rack in my room. I was taught by Vietnam vets. I think the majority of them would agree with many parts of your assessment, but I suspect at least some of them would be aghast at how you're missing the point. Does it matter how a military or a government achieves it's objectives? Unless you think the ends justify the means, yes it does. Does it matter if the actions align with your values? Yes it does.
You, yourself, have noted how the repercussions have reverberated down the years, but I'm not sure you're correctly interpreting what that means.
In a way, it's the same sort of mistake made by the worst of the authoritarian SJWs. Let's say you use technically legal force, bureaucratic pressure, and bad PR tactics to frighten and coerce people into doing what you want, but in doing so you convince nobody while violating a bunch of values, principles, and feelings -- what does that actually get you? It gets you further from the underlying goal. By the same token, let's say you use military force and kill or frighten everyone opposed to your client state, what does that really get you? If you've turned enough of the populace against you, it gets you less than what you had before.
In 2018, winning is through convincing, not coercing.
This seems similar to declaring that Germany won the war against the British in 1940. They smashed the enemy forces and drove them off the continent, after all.
