Politics: Vietnam and Iraq

Steve has this to say about President Bush's recent statements on the war:

So President Bush shared in his trip to Vietnam that one of the lessons learned from that war was, "We'll succeed unless we quit." What? That's the lesson we learned in Vietnam? I am not an expert in the Vietnam war, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the primary lesson that we learned.

Actually it was, especially when you get down to the military nitty-gritty of the war. As someone who has worked or contracted for the US Army since I was in college, the lesson the military (and by extension the government) learned from Vietnam is that the only place we will lose a war is the home front. The enemy cannot stand against us in battle in either a fair or an unfair fight. They can sting us and hurt us, but they cannot stop us. But the people of the United States can and probably will lose heart if the enemy bloodies our nose badly enough and often enough.

Because of this realization, the military has extensively researched force-multiplying technologies since the end of the Vietnam War. Better armor. Better weapons. Robots to do dangerous missions instead of men. Etc. Etc. Why? So the enemy can't put pictures of American dead on TV like in Vietnam or Somalia or Iraq. The military can't fix America's glass jaw, so their only option is to try to win the war quickly and decisively so we don't take those casualties in the first place.