Setting aside the typo of an extra dot in with your ellipsis and period, I'm unclear what the point of this disclaimer is. Are you suggesting we might not have realized it's a thought without your labeling it as one? Or what?

yes, lol.... their are many here who do not understand such things as possible for any one parroting theirs...

Patton quotes:

If everybody is thinking alike,
then somebody isn't thinking.

Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time.

The object of war is not to die for your country
but to make the other bastard die for his

A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.

I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people.
Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer

Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.

I do not fear failure. I only fear the "slowing up" of the engine inside of me which is pounding, saying, "Keep going, someone must be on top, why not you?"

Not all to the point but hey....

It's like when you discuss some thing and you say what if and I say ya but what if.....

Not like when I say what if and you say well that has not been accepted by my acceptability programing, you can read a lot of books study a lot of conclusions come up with your own and reuse those of others...... I'm am not saying there is any thing wrong with it....

but how do you go about cost analyzing a war or the effects of not having one in the past....I do by adding up the slaves, the deaths, and absolute evil or deluded good spread by the power of those who are victorious.....

What year do you suggest we should have used what means of intervention to "stomp out Communism"? Should we perhaps have tried intervening on one side in the Russian Civil War? Or invading in 1946? 1956? 1962? Or what?

I have to say that it's a darn shame if you've retroactively figured out some way to "stomp out Communism" that would have worked, without losses that would have not compensated for the gains, but it never occurred to anyone at the time.

You do have to do a cost-benefit analysis, I'm sure you realize, not just a pure benefit-only analysis, of whatever your proposal may be.

"Remember it's just a thought....."

Setting aside the typo of an extra dot in with your ellipsis and period, I'm unclear what the point of this disclaimer is. Are you suggesting we might not have realized it's a thought without your labeling it as one? Or what?

And since in the end they collapsed peacefully, there's hardly a good case to be made for having engaged in such a lunatic war.

Peacefull for who, plainly not for the millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dead folks....

***MEDIAN: 51 million for the entire Stalin Era; 20M during the 1930s.***

Not to mention the 100+million totaled deaths that were the product of doing nothing when we might have had a shot to stomp out Communism before it was to late, I suppose they died peacefully and all non lunatic like......

Remember it's just a thought.....

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

First of all, they wouldn't actually have even had to use nukes; all they had to do is what China did, at the time with Soviet support, in Korea: pour in millions of their own Chinese troops, and some more Soviet advisors and pilots and equipment. Mao didn't give a shit about how many troops he lost.

And he had a lot of troops. As MacArthur found out.

Second, while Kruschchev, and his sucessors, certainly did not in any way desire a nuclear exchange with the U.S. (Mao was more sanguine), they were willing to risk nuclear war when they felt their prestige was at stake, such as in Cuba, and Berlin. And that meant that there was insufficient reason for us to take that risk in Vietnam. The Soviets were extremely conscious of not being seen to clearly be backing down, just as we were, though the Soviets were even more so, lacking the general economic power and world influence of the U.S., and having a distinct inferiority complex about that that they constantly felt they needed to prove they did not, in fact, have. So even if somehow we could have held off a million Chinese soldiers -- and I don't know how we could have done that without nukes -- the Soviets and Chinese were, in the end, all too likely to consider the use of nukes, and certainly so in the face of our using them.

(Although Nixon, in some of his drunken moments, did rant about wanting to use nukes in Vietnam. But he never seriously proceeded with any such plans. For one thing, there simply wasn't much practical use for them. Even if we'd nuked Hanoi, the North Vietnamese still would have just kept fighting, and Hanoi simply wasn't logistically critical.)

This all would have been, as said in Ghostbusters about crossing your streams, bad.

Which is why eventually LBJ became, and from the start, Nixon was, convinced that there was no possible military solution to the Vietnam war. (The true blame certainly does lie with Johnson for not realizing it before his massive escalation. But Nixon then gets the blame for deliberately and consciously prolonging the war for another 5+ years purely for purposes of being re-elected and getting the same terms the North Vietnamese offered in 1968.)

"I have an old philosophy about war. Don’t get into it unless you willing to go all the way."

Good philosophy. Same as never draw a gun unless you're willing to shoot, and willing to kill.

Bluffing when the stakes are deadly isn't a smart bet.

We could have occupy the North and made it difficult for outside forces to supply them, sort of the way we did with Iraq although Iran did get some support in but not at the level if we didn’t have troops on the ground.
Would the Soviet and China have been willing for an all out war? Many in hindsight don’t think so but one never knows. The U.S. was still gun-shy from it happing in Korea but who knows. I think if they saw we were serious about outside influence, they would back down.

I have an old philosophy about war. Don’t get into it unless you willing to go all the way. In the end you will get into fewer conflicts since you pick fewer fights and others are less likely to pick a fight with you.

I think your analysis of Vietnam itself is quite accurate. But with all respect to General Giap's observation and to the dead,the long run wasn't about Vietnam.

It was about which system would dominate the world,General Giap's murderous communists or our merely avaricious capitalists. Vietnam and several other skirmish's I participated in were merely proxy wars, side shows if you will.

I was there last year, and I can assure you General Giap's people's paradise is going decidedly capitalist.

We won the main event.PERIOD(without turning the world into a giant piece of charcoal)

Now the question is can we hold it? Or will American capitalism SUBPRIME and CDO itself into oblivion? Are we just another late empire decadent Rome,waiting for the barbarian hordes and Chinese bankers to come for us? That is the relevant question.

We didn't "give them" half of Europe; they took it from Germany at the cost of some 20,000,000 deaths. They won the war against Germany; we were a sideshow (primarily through lend-lease, which was of tremendous aid to the Soviet Union). We couldn't have won a subsequent war against the Soviet Union, at best, without equivalent costs, if at all. Post-1949, it would have been a nuclear war, of course.

And since in the end they collapsed peacefully, there's hardly a good case to be made for having engaged in such a lunatic war.

Here I am, reading an intelligent discussion, when suddenly G.A. butts in and says one of his stupidest comments ever (and that's saying something).

Because as always you miss the point.

my point was if we had taken care communist threat in Russia then instead of giving them half of Europe would we have ever had to go to or do a Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, the nuclear arms race and the rest of the Cold War.......
IT'S JUST A THOUGHT.......

But I really I would love for you to TRY to say I dishonor veterans to my face...

Well don't forget Patton, he wanted to take care of the Communist threat not to long after that, would it have cost a lot, very much I think, but what was the cost seeing we did nothing but appease them.....

Here I am, reading an intelligent discussion, when suddenly G.A. butts in and says one of his stupidest comments ever (and that's saying something).

In what way was Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, the nuclear arms race and the rest of the Cold War doing "nothing but appeasing Communists"? I'm guessing a lot of veterans feel they were doing a little more than that, you sniveling little yellow-bellied woodpecker.

June 6, 1944, the Germans Had tanks, Panzers, We had Shermans. The Germams had Erwin Rommel. We had Ike.

Well don't forget Patton, he wanted to take care of the Communist threat not to long after that, would it have cost a lot, very much I think, but what was the cost seeing we did nothing but appease them.....

Let me explain it to you. You treat it like a war.

For every war you should do this, heck every time someone is foolish enough to shoot a missile our way.....

But if we could use a time machine to drop General Petraus and his staff into the mix around 1965, who knows?

Ya a time machine, we sure could use one now to go get someone and then drop him off.....or did we....Bill?Ted?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyUX6wV1lBQ

Lessons should be learned within their realm.

Indeed, like, don't let ideology blind you into getting involved in another country's civil war...

For the record, I have absolutely no disagreement with that.

The factories and finance were in China and the Soviet Union, which is where the supply lines started. Short of declaring all out war on both these countries, what you suggest could not be done. You can't take out factories in China and the Soviet Union without attacking them. You cannot take out their finance without conquering them. And there was no way to cut off the supply lines, period. The entire effort of the U.S. was devoted to doing that: everything was tried; besides aerial attack, a barrier of electronic sensors was tried; it simply wasn't in the U.S.'s capability.

"However to say that there was no way short of nukes to win it is ridiculous."

This wasn't a decision that was up to America. It was up to the Soviet Union and China.

And I think it was obviously the right choice for neither LBJ nor Nixon to launch full-out attacks on both, or either, China or the Soviet Union.

"Someone stating how to win a war doesn’t mean they think it should be done."

Sure, but I'm pointing out that this "how" is in fantasyland.

There were plenty of lesser mistakes the U.S. made, and military lessons to be learned, from the Vietnam War, but none of them had to do with somehow ultimately "winning the war."

Let me explain it to you. You treat it like a war. You go all out minus the nukes. Bombing raids aren’t enough. You need feet on the ground. You take out the enemy means to conduct war which mean taking out their factories, leaders, and finance and supply lines. You do not wait for them to build units attack you and if you defeat them let them regroup and try again.

Yes we were afraid of another Korea where we didn’t believe China would have got involve. Maybe the war would have escalated, maybe not. Even if they did we had a good chance of winning an all out plus\minus nukes. Would it have been worth it? Not in my opinion which regrettably puts me in agreement with AIP. However to say that there was no way short of nukes to win it is ridiculous.

The ”it delay expansion argument” has some validity. However there were so many mistakes made including backing a corrupt system, politicians running the war, and public treatment of veterans to not take away some lessons but taking away the wrong lessons can be just as harmful as not learning from them.

IMO we shouldn’t have got involved in Vietnam and it wouldn’t be worth the price to do what was needed to win the war. Could we have? Yes. Should we have? No. Should we have done things differently? Yes including not getting involved in the first place but once involved we should have done many things different also. Lessons should be learned within their realm. Someone stating how to win a war doesn’t mean they think it should be done.