US has superior air force, navy, and army. And lost to ill-equipped Vietnam and China. How did that happen?
They just gave up
Because the US were being nice. Wanted to avoid civilian casualties and pretend to be the good guys. Throw that out the window and US could reduce Vietnam to ash and indiscriminately bombing everything and burning down all forests and gassing every tunnel. People haven’t seen US fight a real war that it actually gives a shit about. E.g. defending its own land
It's so incredibly hard to fight an insurgency especially with 60s equipment and technology, while also not completely destroying the country
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Emergency British successfully handled it. It’s all about political will.
I'm not sure that conflict compares to the Vietnam war. You can see for yourself in the page you linked the strength of each side, 450k vs <10k is far off the Vietnam war numbers
The fish sauce
it's sort of the same deal with Afghanistan, where you have a tough terrain, people doing ambush attacks and then running back into hiding. The US got so frustrated it brought out agent orange to clear out to jungle, and people in Vietnam still have birth defects to this day as a result
The Viet Cong would snipe out our troops, kill them in their sleep, or use prostitutes to kill the GI’s then run off and hide before our troops could take them out. Every time we tried to eliminate the threat, the Cong was hidden. Our troops would see their buddies get killed without the ability to avenge them. Since the enemy rarely fought face to face; just sneak attacks. This type of warfare seriously messed with the troops mentally. So when our troops would hit back the areas that the Viet Cong were know to hide out, the Viet Cong troops were long gone and had populated those areas with Vietnamese civilians. So after the dust settled after a village attack, the Viet Cong would come back into the village and have a fresh list of civilian volunteers who wanted revenge on the American troops. This element combined with treacherous terrain and jungles diseases made winning that war very difficult. Also, due to those dynamics, few American soldiers knew what winning the war would even look like as there was lack of a clear directive other than just surviving.
They didn't post TC
Media coverages of Tet Offensive in 1968 destroyed American public political will to stay in Vietnam. Viet Cong got completely destroyed militarily but they won political victory.
There are a couple of comments here from people who clearly understand guerilla warfare and insurgency. The Vietnam to Afghanistan parallels are very relevant. Armies can fight armies. Armies can’t fight a smaller tactical force that blends in among the civilian population and can maneuver in/hide in the terrain. And that’s even assuming that the country as a whole is in support of the invading army. France wanted to be liberated during WWII, and would put up with a lot of social issues to enable that. Did Afghanistan or Vietnam really want to buy what the US was selling?
Weakness of democracy. The public didn't support it, and politicians need their votes every other year