Korea as a rehearsal for Vietnam

Although different in important respects, the wars in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-73) had much in common. Both were Cold-War conflicts conceived as limited, non-nuclear wars to halt the spread of communism, and both resulted in heavy losses: in Korea, some 36,000 US troops died; in Vietnam, 58,000. Other parallels extend beyond these statistics: before the wars began, both Korea and Vietnam, through international agreement, had been partitioned into a communist north and a US client-based south, making both countries potentially combustible. The outcome of the two conflicts was the opposite of what America and its allies intended: at the time of writing (2008), North Korea remains a nuclear-armed communist state ruled by a despot, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam continues to be a united communist nation whose relations with the USA were normalized only in 1995.

In both wars, the USA was taught a traumatic lesson in the new realities of warfare as its advanced technology proved insufficient to achieve victory in either the cold, mountainous terrain of Korea or the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam. US military theorists remained fixated on conventional war as fought on the battlefields of Europe, and its politicians too often ignored low troop morale and motivation. In these two remote Asian wars, the American public, after an initial period of enthusiasm, soon grew disillusioned, and US soldiers found it increasingly difficult to believe in the causes they were supposedly fighting for.