Vietnam Syndrome

The Vietnam Syndrome, in U.S. politics, is a term used to refer to public aversion to American overseas military involvements, following the domestic controversy over the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. Since the early 1980s, the combination of a public opinion apparently biased against war, a relative reluctance to deploy ground troops and conscription, and "Vietnam paralysis" are all the perceived results of the syndrome.

There is a general consensus by global historians and even most military analysts that from a purely strategic point of view, the U.S. military was losing the war on the battlefield despite its superior firepower and superior technology, due largely to political decisions that hampered the efforts of military command. Military historians and those who participated in the war note that indeed, the full spread of United States military technology, numbers, and expertise was present during the war, all the way to its very end, but the requirement of individual bombing raids being approved by the Commander in Chief personally, hindered the ability of commanders in country to execute an effective war strategy. While the Viet Cong and the regular North Vietnamese Army employed an agility in ways the United States forces and South Vietnamese forces did not, the lopsided losses experienced by the North indicated the effectiveness of the American execution of the war when political factors were not influencing actions on the battlefield. The victory of the communist forces in Vietnam can be at least partially attributed to non-military factors such as anti-war sentiments in the United States and political interference involving micromanagement of responsibilities typically delegated to military command (millions of Vietnamese were killed, versus many thousands, but not millions, of United States or South Vietnamese troops). The north Vietnamese were well versed in guerrilla warfare, sabotage, a typical and asymmetric battlefield moves, infiltration, etc., but their unsustainable casualty count would not have survived a protracted engagement in the absence of major American political interference and Communist funded anti-war propaganda in the United States which eroded popular support for the conflict.

Lyndon Johnson faced many of the same problems in Vietnam that Harry Truman faced in Korea. Johnson's principal problems were to fight the war successfully without widening the conflict to include intervention by the major Communist powers. This problem would color nearly every decision Johnson made about the war, would force him (from his point of view) to take personal command of the air war in North Vietnam, and would frustrate the military leadership, just as they had been frustrated during the Korean War.

The broad political objective was simple and clear-cut. However, the military's role in achieving that objective was much more obscure. According to Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, William Bundy, the primary focus of the American military effort was to "get Hanoi and North Vietnam (DRV) support and direction removed from South Vietnam." It is particularly important to note that the American military objective did not contemplate "winning" in the sense that the United States and its Allies had won World War II. The available policy documents rarely made reference to defeating the enemy. Indeed, General Westmoreland notes that in 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara defined the American military objective by asking Westmoreland "how many additional American and Allied troops would be required to convince the enemy he would be unable to win." In essence, the American military objective was not to defeat or destroy the enemy. Rather, the military objective was to persuade the enemy that he could not win—a far cry from defeating the enemy in any traditional sense.

There are those who explicitly equate the Vietnam Syndrome with a similar narrative prior to and the formation of Nazi Germany, in which the idea was spread that Germany had not actually lost World War I but had instead been "stabbed in the back by" forces from within that secretly wanted Germany to lose that war and to be weakened. That narrative, while central to Nazi Germany's bid for legitimacy - though refuted by unbiased scholars, persists with respect to the Vietnam conflict due largely to the severe imbalance of casualties that the North Vietnamese suffered (a roughly eight to one ratio).