[vinceguidry]

> Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.

That seems to me to be quite an oversimplification of what wins wars. Every war tech has had edge cases that motivated adversaries managed to overcome.

For example, despite the Vietcong's gross disadvantage in terms of technology, it's leaders managed to force over time the US's withdrawal. We didn't run out of men. We ran out of political will. The battle over political will is vastly different than the battle to save and destroy men. The Vietcong eventually came to realize this and optimized their strategy around it, and none of our horrific technological marvels could defeat that tailored strategy.

In fact, if you're just looking at body count, the North Vietnamese should have lost before we withdrew. We optimized around body counts but were unable to attain our military goals. These days, men won and lost are, if not the least of our concerns, are definitely not the most.

[chroma]

I think you misunderstand me. The sides can have different thresholds for "too many body bags." The american threshold was lower, because the americans weren't fighting in defense of their homeland. Had the war been a purely financial expense for the US, they would have stuck around for much longer.

[vinceguidry]

Body counts have nothing to do with it. There's no 'differing threshold', even if it might look that way, if that's the only data you have available to you.

A democratic nation-state fights a war in a very different way than one without such sophistication. The American political will to fight arises out of its sense of justice and duty. We really believed we were fighting for freedom. Until it became abundantly clear that we weren't, we were happy to throw men and money into the meat grinder for years upon years.

A non-democratic nation fights for as long as the person directing the war maintains his ability to do so. That is the key difference between a western power and an emerging nation. We've got beliefs that can be orchestrated into terrific displays of force, other nations have to coerce the means to project force from the people somehow.

It's what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. As long as most Americans believe that what we are doing there is right, we'll keep at it no matter what. Oh we might pour more or less money into it, adjust our military footprint, but we're going to keep fighting the good fight for as long as we believe that it's the good fight. That belief is robust, it will resist attempts to dislodge it, the same way that a person's irrational beliefs aren't simply changed.

The Vietcong eventually came to realize this. They used their dwindling resources to stage attacks, not where they were needed militarily, but where they would be filmed. The culmination of this strategy was the Tet Offensive, which was carefully orchestrated to look far more large-scale, at least on cameras, than it was. It was an amazing feat, and it accomplished exactly what it had set out to, to tip the balance of public opinion against the war. Militarily, it was a failure, none of the attacks went anywhere and the fighters faded back into the jungle as quickly as they emerged.

It wasn't anything like how many soldiers we lost that caused us to pull out. It was the public perception of how the war was going, what we were doing there, where it was going.