Explain Why The Us Lost The Vietnam War Essay

The Vietnam war is an incredibly controversial topic; some say America won, while others say that they lost. The cold, hard truth is that America took a major loss in the approximately 20 year long war and were never winning at any point. The reason the Americans officially lost the war is because they were unable to achieve their goal ; the exact opposite actually happened. Once the American forces left South Vietnam in January of 1975 communism immediately overran it. There are 3 key reasons that will later on thoroughly explain exactly why America lost the Vietnam war. First of all the Americans lost because the North Vietnamese wanted to win more than they did. Second of all the American’s bombing strategies were horrendously ineffective

It was crystal clear that the NVA were much more determined to win than the Americans ; you could tell from the actions of the North Vietnamese that they were willing to go all out to win whereas the U.S army was at times a bit reluctant to do everything they could to come out victorious. Some people might not think that the willingness to win can turn the tides of war, but the truth is that it plays a major role in determining who will come out ahead. The willingness to win plays a colossal role in helping to decide who will come out ahead because if one country is willing to do whatever it takes to win a war it means that they will use everything they got to make sure they win ; the U.S was not willing to do whatever it takes to win the war in Vietnam and that is huge factor of their

For example the goals of Operation Rolling Thunder were to demoralize the North Vietnamese people and to undermine the power of the North Vietnamese government both of which failed to happen. America was unable to achieve its goals with Operation Rolling Thunder because the North Vietnamese leaders with some help from China and the USSR were able to set up an effective defense which rendered the American bombing raids useless. The North Vietnamese people also took a multitude of steps of their own to further reduce the impact of the bombing raids from the Americans by assembling a system of bombproof tunnels and shelters which were surprisingly