How It's Done

It's been a long time since I was in the army, but I seem to remember it goes something like this:

First you establish air superiority, which means you need to be able to put more planes into the air than they can. I don't know if North Vietnam even had an air force but, if they did, it must have been neutralized early on because our guys were able to bomb Hanoi effectively. Bombing alone usually will not win a war, however. In the case of Japan, the two atom bombs only shortened the war, they alone did not win it. If those two bombs had not been used, the next step would have been an amphibious landing, but we can skip that step because our guys already had a beachhead established in South Vietnam.

As soon as your planes are out of the way, you start the artillery shelling. The big guns are usually located behind the infantry and fire over their heads. Of course, the bombs and artillery inflict considerable damage, but their main value is that they cause the enemy to keep their heads down so your infantry can advance. Tanks and infantry usually advance together, but not always. Sometimes the tanks sit back and act as artillery, lobbing shells over the heads of the infantry. However you do it, the war isn't over until the enemy has been killed, captured, or driven from the objective and your guys physically occupy the ground. At some point, the enemy may surrender, but you still need to put your boots on the ground to make sure that it isn't just a delaying tactic. After the war, you still need  to occupy the ground until a new civilian government has been established and you're sure that the old guys aren't coming back.

That's the way they won World War II. I think the reason it wasn't done that way in Vietnam is that they didn't want to defeat communism, they just wanted to contain it. Korea was fought pretty much the old fashioned way, but they stopped short and allowed the commies to retreat behind their own lines and stay there. The objective seems to have been to get them out of South Korea, but not out of North Korea. I can only speculate about why. I could assert that they wanted to keep communism alive so they would have a convenient scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the world, but that would be just paranoid. I was against that policy at the time but, looking back on it, maybe they were right. If you've got to have an enemy, better a semi fake enemy like international socialism than those Islamic fanatics we are facing today. They seem to have arisen to fill the void created when Russian communism collapsed of its own weight. Maybe our guys should have given the Russians more foreign aid.