Getting neutered by Nth Vietnam for instance.
Whenever people say this, I just can't help but think it a a very inaccurate assumption. I don't think losing the Vietnam War was a show of America's weakness, but rather the strength of guerrilla war tactics, especially on one's home turf. I mean, look at the American Revolutionary War, and the strength of the British Empire at the time. Clearly guerrilla warfare in home turf is OP
True, but America had learned the lessons (hopefully) about the strength of a popular armed rebellion.
The British Empire was probably quite unprepared for this sort of fighting.
And if it was a sign of guerrilla strength, it was also most definitely a show of American (and Australian) weakness.
It is also an unfair parallel. Most of America's involvement was in South Vietnam, right? And the thirteen colonies were British before hand.
And the difference between the power and the allies of the rebel americans and the British; and North Vietnam and the US, was not quite the same.
And the US's Military power was extreme, to say the least. They could have and probably should have won.
There are a lot of things that went against the US in Vietnam, I certainly wouldn't say it was the US getting neutered, as much as America neutering itself.
We were supporting an unpopular government with the people in the countryside where the combat was taking place, with a native military that was almost completely ineffectual so the only real combat progress made in the war was made with the US military. This proved especially bad with the VC being a guerrilla force, as there wasn't many places in the country side that weren't on the VC side.
We couldn't really (though we occasionally did) bomb the Ho Chi Min trail, since it was in Cambodia and Laos, so the VC could resupply and move around country pretty much at will without much fear of being cut off or killed en route.
We were still fighting the war like we were in Germany, conventional tactics that just couldn't work in the situation. There are famous pictures of an entire American infantry platoon laying prone because of one farmer/VC with a rifle hidden in a tree. Sometimes for hours. They would call in artillery barrages and air strikes for a single person hiding in the bush.
Think about that for a second, 42 men with all the power and training of the United States being held down for hours immobile by one farmer with a 60 year old mosin-nagant. In the military thats called a force multiplier.
So at the height of the US engagement in 1968 we had a little over 500,000 soldiers against the NVC/VC combined forces of about 420,000. But with that kind of force multiplier on the VC side, if only 10,000 VC could do what that one farmer did, then it was more like the US facing 840,000 soldiers with their 500,000.
Our military was filled with drug addiction and was practically a shell of its former self as well. If you look up anything on drug issues in the US military in the late 60s and 70s you'll see a systemic problem of epic proportions.
I mean it was a comedy of errors really. We didn't have the political will at home to do what would have been needed to win. Which would have been moving to a total war, ship over overwhelming forces and move into Laos and Cambodia and secure the HCM trail. We would then have had to secure every village, town and city and police them until we could rebuild the nation, its police and military so they could fight the sure to follow rebellion.
Sounds a lot like Iraq and Afghanistan for that, and its sad we made the same mistake not twice but three times.