You are spot on correct. The military is now being used by people that; a) have no understanding of the military, b) have little love for the military and, c) are only interested in politics and not military doctrine or meeting an "endgame" goal of winning!

If you are not "in it to win it", it is time to get out and not waste American lives and wealth in sheer stupidity! This will be Obama's legacy.....

Excellent! Harry Summers wrote the book regarding a post Vietnam assessment of what went wrong. Summers book has been used for several generations now as the handbook of what the military was and how it must be used and when it cannot.

We have had approximately 25 years (or so) of an intelligently built and utilized military however now, under the incompetent gaze of the Obama (and yes, Bush) administrations, the military is back to its Vietnam era use (armed social workers without a military mission).

Again, as in Vietnam, we are in "conflicts" that we are not even trying to win, run by a "politicized" military leadership with incompetent, political hacks calling the shots on behalf of an administration that hates the military.

Witness the 300 flag officers that refused to become "hacks" of the administration that were all but cashiered out of the military.

Harry Summer's book has all but been discarded by this administration hence our adversaries now have little fear and no respect for our men and women in uniform.

So! As you said in your statement, "We didn't try to win" then (I.e., Vietnam) and we are not really trying now with these pin-prick drone strikes and soldiers being sent out on missions without proper support, credible missions deemed more dangerous now than at any other time. Stupid is as stupid does and Americans are being put in harm's way needlessly and for all of the wrong reasons.

Welcome to Obama's "Political" war run by his faux "Best and Brightest" academic hacks......

Excellent observation on the draft and the apparent reasons for its use during the Vietnam conflict however, there are certain aspects that are never touched upon that in my minds eye have significant weight in other "whys" that should be considered.

If you remember, under Johnson there was a domestic strategy that was put in play by the Kennedy/Johnson "best and brightest" brain trust (I.e., McNamara, etc.) that embraced the "Guns and Butter" fallacy that provided a false prosperity back home. Hundreds of billions of dollars went into the war however the cynical "Great Society" was forced upon us as well.

There was also a great recession that was starting and even taking hold in the mid to late 60's that had to be addressed. Thanks to the leading edge of the "Baby Boomer" generation, there was a growing concern about unemployment, disaster after disaster in the racially charged areas of the country and of course, the need for fighting men (and women) for Vietnam. This set the stage for the draft because in the eyes of Washington, (the Johnson administration specifically) both left, right and the economy were addressed. Guns and butter! Also, let's get all of those raging young men off the streets. It became a sociological medicine for what was ailing an out of touch nation now run against any and all of the founders brilliant legacy. Ayn Rand understood what was going on much better than even she was given credit for!

I believe the draft was little more than a cynical tool of an irresponsible, growing statist government hunkered down within the Beltway!

Correct! Obama and the left have learned nothing! There is absolutely no understanding of the military and how it should be used by this administration.

Transgender, women in the foxholes and a whole raft of stupidity is making us the laughing stock and that is not good! Our enemies (current and future) are salivating at the gross incompetence now running the US military into the ground where it will not be able to meet even its most rudimentary mission requirements

If this were a time of "declared" war, Obama would probably be impeached on the grounds of Treason.

Incompetence, ignorance and malice aforethought are the marching orders of; Obama, his administration and now the Clinton candidacy! For what its worth!

True....In addition the Republican party generally now is the party of interventionism, well beyond what the founders conceived. Democrats have adopted the strategy of using the US military as "Armed social workers" and the NEOCONs want to wield it everywhere. It has become in many ways a symbiotic relationship, melding the Progressives on the left and the NEOCONS on the right. Classical Liberalism has been kicked to the curb along with the wisdom of the founders!

Ayn Rand, "The Wreckage of the Consensus" in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal:

"The question of the draft is, perhaps, the most important single issue debated today. But the terms in which it is being debated are a sorry manifestation of our anti-ideological 'mainstream'.

"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

"If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?"

That was just one part of Ayn Rand's analysis of the Vietnam war in her April 1967 Boston Ford Hall Forum lecture, before the nation ultimately rose up in fervor against the war and the draft. Her lecture is well worth reading or re-reading for its typical philosophical, principled approach, before the major national turmoil that was yet to come over a war which the country never should have been in.

American's involvement in the Vietnam war was never in the country's interest or necessary for defense. It was an incompetent foreign policy adventure initiated by the incompetent president John F Kennedy and escalated by Kennedy and Johnson refusing to check their false premises. Kennedy also characteristically botched his Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba when he amateurishly rewrote and neutered Eisenhower's invasion plans (see Victor Lasky's J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth) -- with disastrous long term results of permanent communist dictatorship in Cuba and the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviets.

As Ayn Rand showed at Ford Hall in 1967, the Kennedy-Johnson foreign policy in Vietnam was hopelessly botched on principle from the beginning -- including the insane military strategy of 'fight with one hand tied behind our back'. The war escalated into a major national crisis before Nixon's Pragmatism made it worse, pointlessly disrupting the lives of and killing increasing numbers of American conscripts -- later under the name of a random lottery claimed to be "fair" and evading government responsibility -- and then causing increased suffering and injustice to the abandoned allies in Vietnam when Nixon abruptly "declared victory by withdrawing". The government under three presidents managed to do the worst of everything.

The later and growing media opposition to the war didn't cause the national debacle, the media merely reacted to the popular opposition to the war stemming from the draft, which is what eventually stopped the war -- and rhetorically pandered to the propaganda of the left, making the whole crisis worse. Consequences we still suffer from today came from the rise of the New Left, which exploited opposition to the war and the draft as a platform on which to propagandize and elevate it's own influence and methods -- now inside of and running the government. That is the philosophical trend anyway, but exploitation of the Vietnam crisis accelerated it.

I see I got out lucky and also with a two-month "school cut."
So many lowdown SOBs with a (D) beside their names.
But they always have a giddy parade of voting lemmings dancing along behind them.

Okay, I'm relieved I don't have to challenge you to a duel, leaving you to chose pistols or swords or whatever else you may happen to think of.
Dino Advice: Strive to make yourself clearly understood.
I used my GI Bill to buy an education toward a degree in journalism, though I was a reporter/photographer for only 7 years before I took up another career.

Thanks for your comment. They weren't as friendly when I was there.

In '92 I was one of very few Americans in Ho Chi Minh City. Most westerners were Russian. Russians kept trying to talk to me. My Russian was poor and my accent was American. They'd stare at me stunned, then turn and walk away.

I always smiled. I could sense their confusion - the Americans are back???

I'd appreciate it if you'd read the first comment under "Thanks Nam vets". It's my answer to why we didn't win. I'd appreciate any comments about my thesis.

A friend of mine and his wife just strolled past the US Consulate last night in Saigon. Here is what he had to say:

"We walked by the US Consulate last night in Saigon. It's located on the same patch of ground where the Embassy once stood. There wasn't much to see since the walls are high and the communist government had the original building demolished in 1975. The US has built a new consulate building to process visa applications. Everyday there are several hundred people lined up all day long to apply for a US visa. So even 40 years after the end of the war people who were not born understand what the US means.

I nodded to the Vietnamese guard who smiled back with his MP5 at his side. It's interesting that even the guard had a friendly smile."

I remember my Dad, a WWII AAF P-38 crew chief in North Africa, lecturing the family in 1966. We needed to get the B-52's going in force and carpet bomb the crap out of North Vietnam and have done with it and bring our boys home.

By 1972 he was so disgusted and fed up with the whole thing. A diehard American patriot sickened to his stomach. Moreover, his only son was both turning 18 and graduating high school in May of 1973. I did the pre-registering, of course got A1 status, and then came the draft lottery of #14. My Dad was actually considering on sending me to college in Nova Scotia. Dalhousie. But they ended the draft that spring and I was off the hook.

What a great idea for a short:

The Obamamonster!

Ahhhhhhhhh!

Is this supposed to be an insult or what?

my two sons went on full scholarship in florida...and kept the scholarship till graduation...very proud of them...smarter than dad...