The strategy of attrition premised on the belief that the US could inflict so many casualties and so much damage on the enemy that they would eventually be unable and unwilling to fight.
This strategy failed: Vietnamese were willing to send in more troops than we did, our bombing raids increased NV ingenuity: tunnels, underground factories.
Between 1961 and 1963, President Kennedy launched a full-scale counterinsurgency program in Vietnam, part of which would become the “pacification” program.
This strategy did not work: It suffered from being “too little, too late” (CORDS not activated until 1967); perceived as competition with the “big war” and many military officers favored a “military solution
For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia.
After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome.
See American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973 to learn more.