Once I spent considerable time reviewing how military aircraft (fixed wing) were lost in Vietnam; the thought didn’t arise, that some elements of society would be encouraged by the loss or waste that accompanies war. Nominally, the objective is to reduce such losses. Later, I learned the US lost thousands of helicopters in Vietnam, and it changed my perspective somewhat.
The war industry was usually understood in the context of military Keynesianism, inherited from WWII and then the Korean conflict, when the military industrial infrastructure became permanent. Part of Biden’s perspective is “fighting smart,” that is, rather than fighting a war with your own soldiers, and lose many lives that give rise to popular resentment and political opposition, try to use as few of your own troops as possible. Now this approach has reached its ultimate formulation in Ukraine, after a transition period in the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, where lesser numbers of US troops were placed at risk to avoid political backlash. In Ukraine, rather than “Vietnamizing” a conflict near the end, this is the starting point.
Fletcher Prouty made the point that there was a major undertaking to Vietnamize the war from the outset, but it failed and required the commitment of massive numbers of US and allied troops. But in theory, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars can be wasted under some national security pretext to earn profit for the few without loss of life in the sponsoring state. In terms of lives lost, the “client” or proxy state bears the loss of life and destruction of its society. The domestic constituency is spared the direct impact of body bags and the visible destruction of their own society making forever war possible.
