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We have learned multiple hard lessons from the Viet Nam War some of which are followed, some less so.

On the highest level, the Viet Nam War needs to be viewed as being comprised of three distinct phases: The Kennedy-Johnson Phase, The Nixon-Kissinger Phase, and the post-Watergate phase. In these three phases radically distinct grand strategies were pursued that produced radically different results. Two of the results were catastrophically bad and one produced a good result.

During the Kennedy-Johnson phase of the war a particular military strategy was pursued derived from a grave geopolitical miscalculation. This misreading of the geopolitical climate involved a misreading of the intentions of the Chinese. Both Kennedy and Johnson White House were obsessed with a possible intervention of the Chinese on behalf of the Vietnamese as had happened in the Korean War. This obsession was misplaced and demonstrably false as documents unearthed after the war revealed. The reality was that the Chinese and the Vietnamese hated each other and fought a number of wars and border skirmishes over several centuries. This insight escaped all the savants of the Kennedy-Johnson brain trust with particular scorn being reserved for the monumental and persistent obtuseness of then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

Based upon this fundamentally defective view of geopolitics, the Kennedy-Johnson team
proceeded to prosecute a "police action" in Viet Nam. As a military strategy this amounted to little more than a bloody stalemate with no chance of victory. A war where air targeting is being manged from the White House is a recipe for defeat. The Vietnamese interpreted "graduated escalation" as a sign of American weakness which they exploited skillfully.

With the accession of Richard Nixon a radically new war policy was pursued that rejected the geopolitical constraints of the Kennedy-Johnson era and advocated a strategy that would lead military victory on the ground and "Peace with Honor". The first step of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy was to diplomatically isolate the North Vietnamese from Chinese and Russian arms sales. This was accomplished by Nixon's historic diplomatic initiative with China and expanding Detente with Russia. The impact of these initiatives was to all but shut shut off advanced arms sales to North Viet Nam. After the shut off of these sales, North Vietnamese conventional forces became suicidally vulnerable to U.S. air power. Operation Linebacker exposed this vulnerability

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