>>514142236
>It was probably 75 civilians to 25 VC
You don't know what you're talking about. The Ho Chi Minh trail was the supply line for their entire south western front. It had constant troop movements, and SOG operatives were always heavily outnumbered.
Their missions were not to patrol hooches and get body counts, they were in the middle of the jungle with battalions of NVA regulars constantly on the move down south.
>Democracy was never the goal. The mutts got involved in this war because it was a way to convince the French to join NATO.
The French threatened to fuck NATO if the Americans wouldn't bail them out. They inherited the war through several succeeding presidencies, which was probably part of the region their was never real cohesion for the Americans.
I'm not saying that South Vietnam wasn't corrupt, it absolutely was, but a corrupt democracy was a better alternative than potentially losing all of SEA to communism.
>They were constantly bombing North Vietnam
That's disrupting logistics, a true full scale assault is what it would have taken to qualify as an actual attack on North Vietnam.
>>514142449
The bombing campaigns on Laos and Cambodia were overkill, but those were priority missions and the troops on the ground were always outnumbered and in a bad position.
They weren't carpet bombing every square inch of jungle, it was incredibly condensed, usually bombing logistics or as close air support.
You cannot win a war purely by carpet bombing logistics or troop concentrations, and that was never the aim of the bombing campaigns.
Operation Rolling Thunder was retarded from the outset.
>lets slowly bomb our way up north and surely they'll capitulate before we get there!
Instead, the NVA use the extra time to construct formidable air defences in the north.
Operation Linebacker 1 &2 were to try and pressure the NVA into allowing the US to leave the war on terms that were agreeable to the US.
There was never a bombing campaign solely for kills.