How does your moat do against a B-52?
The problem there is that the US was trying to convert them rather than annihilate them, and then you're not actually trying to penetrate their moat, you're trying to limit casualties, whereas they're not.
And then they're not winning by having a functioning moat, they're winning by refusing to surrender to an enemy that has the ability but not the appetite to wipe them out.
Nice history rewriting from the amateur historian ("glass them").
The US dropped more bomb tonnage on North Vietnam than in all of WW2. They dropped more napalm than all of WW2. They even used Agent Orange to defoliate, en masse.
The only thing they didn't use was nukes. And that's because both China and the Soviets had them, not because the goodness of American hearts.
The men on the $2 pedal bikes won. In their moats and tunnels.
I'm not saying that's what they should have done. But if the consequences of losing in Vietnam were the same as the consequences of losing in WW2, the US strategy would have been different, and do you actually think they still would have lost?
> The US dropped more bomb tonnage on North Vietnam than in all of WW2. They dropped more napalm than all of WW2.
Bombings were responsible for ~2% of the casualties in WW2 and a significant percentage of those were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The B-52 didn't even exist during WW2.
> And that's because both China and the Soviets had them, not because the goodness of American hearts.
You're now arguing that the reason was MAD rather than moats.
Moreover, the premise of a moat is to protect some "castle", i.e. a fortification of some kind. To the extent that the VC had anything like that, it was successfully bombed.
Guerilla warfare is an entirely different defense strategy, basically rooted in the premise that your fortifications are going to be destroyed so what you're going to do is not have any.
Nukes were an option in WW2 because only one side had them
The USA lost it because of political reasons, not because it couldn’t continue to fighting.
Deciding rightfully that a war of conquest over a minor territory isn’t with the people’s anger at home is a political decision.
It doesn’t mean the technology used failed to achieve its ends.
The only reason we say the war was lost was because self chosen objectives weren’t competed.
By that measure, if the US goal in WW2 were to fully conquer Germany, it would have “lost” that war too since half of Germany ended up controlled by the Soviets.