War In Vietnam War Essay

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During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, unlike the wars of past, there were no front lines. Conventional tactics should have been thrown out the window. Enemy forces in both wars fought a guerrilla war with guerrilla tactics. This was something American forces were not trained to fight and it showed. Americans used methods designed to beat another army in set-piece battles. In Vietnam the terrain played a huge role for the viet cong where it allowed them to fully use their guerrilla tactics. They would attack static us and south Vietnamese targets and then melt back into the forests. The same kind of tactics would be used later during the second Iraq war were al-queida would just retreat into the hills, mountains, and dessert and in the urban setting…show more content…
Throughout the better part of the 1950′s, Eisenhower’s national security strategy insured that there was no military superpower confrontation. Because Eisenhower had doubts that a “limited war” would remain such, his over-all national security policy, called the “New Look,” was based on the unstoppable nuclear striking power of Strategic Air Command. During this period of relative peace, Democrat political opponents and social-science civilian theorists were in constant chorus that the New Look Massive Retaliation was simply too risky for the country and the world. In spite of the Massive Retaliation doctrine’s success in preventing conflict between the U.S. and Soviet Union, in 1961 President Kennedy and his civilian social-science theorists rewrote the rules of war, conceiving and implementing a replacement doctrine they dubbed “Flexible Response” to counter client proxy warfare. It was at this point that we completely departed from the strategic thinking that had won World War II. There’s much more in the Colonel’s

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