Coin Vietnam War

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Hearts and minds of the civilians is the arson to the power of insurgents, without which, they would not be able to achieve their aim, as seen in the Vietnam War when the US attempted a more ‘on the ground’ approach to unify Vietnam by supporting and pushing the democratic south whilst facing a strong communist north fronted by the Soviet Union. The failure of the counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine and the divided fronts from the United States ultimately cost them the victory required to push out the communist which had already gained backing from the people and was spreading anti-democracy sentiments.

The COIN doctrine was introduced by US as the alternative tactical approach to manage the conflict in Vietnam. It is defined as the military …show more content…
In recent years, with the current climate of asymmetrical warfare, US has been re-introducing COIN as an effective approach for dealing with the insurgency issues in Iraq and Afghanistan as conventional warfare tactics were unable to achieve its desired effects. However, the results of COIN were questionable as the first approach during the Vietnam war was not successful. A second failure in Afghanistan proved that COIN was not exceptionally effective and this led to a restructure in the doctrine. The failure was then attributed to the discrepancy between the theory and the practical usage of COIN, which had arisen in part because of the sunken mentalities within the traditional military structure.

COIN …show more content…
Despite the high trusts in a repeated counterinsurgency, America's encounters in Vietnam were a clear-cut dissatisfaction. Counterinsurgency strategies as they were connected in Vietnam failed to value the subtle of the politicization of the Vietnamese common people, nor the bond amongst guerrillas and the non-military personnel masses. Proponents of the COIN approach in Vietnam oversaw the deployment of small localized teams intended to build up America-friendly Vietnamese defense forces. It never happened. The President at that time, Kennedy and several higher-level bureaucrats absorbed the concept and notion of COIN whilst the Department of Defense was more skeptical and looked disdainfully on the COIN concept. The stubborn adherence to conventional warfare tactics on the part of the Pentagon and the unwillingness, or inability, of President Kennedy to push back against the conventional school of thought with policy change resulted in a bad mixture of conventional warfare and COIN tactics in Vietnam. Although the conflicting tactical theories in the Pentagon led to a continuation and prevail in the war by winning over the citizens, but a contradictory practical application of brute force and high-tech firepower. The institutional conservatism of the American military guided the use of
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