The best thing I would say is the NVA wanted to position itself where US ground forces had to engage with it directly and have a war of attrition, which the US could not politically do while similarly the south was an illegitimate corrupt state that nobody was interested in dying for in a war of attrition so pushing their conscripts to go die would just lead to defections. They did that by going into the jugle to make US air power and artillery less effective while also using Soviet air defense and jets. Guerilla tactics usually avoids massed fighting against your enemy, but that’s actually what the NVA wanted.
If the US could march into North Vietnam that’d be a different story but they were entirely unwilling to do anything like that because it would’ve taken incredible manpower and casualties and the US public was not for it.
Thanks for the correction, I hope to start studying the socialist history of Vietnam much more
The best thing I would say is the NVA wanted to position itself where US ground forces had to engage with it directly and have a war of attrition, which the US could not politically do while similarly the south was an illegitimate corrupt state that nobody was interested in dying for in a war of attrition so pushing their conscripts to go die would just lead to defections. They did that by going into the jugle to make US air power and artillery less effective while also using Soviet air defense and jets. Guerilla tactics usually avoids massed fighting against your enemy, but that’s actually what the NVA wanted.
If the US could march into North Vietnam that’d be a different story but they were entirely unwilling to do anything like that because it would’ve taken incredible manpower and casualties and the US public was not for it.