Strategy & Tactics

Field

The Vietnam War

The war fought between the two Vietnams and their great-power backers from the late 1950s to 1975. With no fixed front and no shared measure of success, it was also a war in which each side went on defining winning differently from the other.

1 casePeriod: 1968

This war had no fixed front, and the two sides measured winning on different scales. So the case in this field starts from a different question: who is doing the judging? Winning on the battlefield changes nothing if the authority to rule on it sits somewhere else.

Patterns found in this field

  1. 11
    A design of the verdict

    Decide who rules on winning before you fight.

    Tet: the verdict was returned off the battlefield →

A pattern is not a template to apply but a tool for checking conditions. The conditions under which each one fails are set out on the patterns page. The thirteen patterns

The US Embassy in Saigon seen through street trees, the building intact, soldiers and civilians on the pavement
Tet: the verdict was returned off the battlefield

The people who rule on winning are not the people on the field. Mistake who they are and you can win and still lose.

Pattern: a design of the verdict
Tactical allied victory, strategic North Vietnamese victory Read →

Other fields

Napoleonic Wars Second Punic War The Pacific War The Eastern Front The Hundred Years War The American Civil War Japan's Warring States period The Western Front, 1940–45 The Western Front, 1914–18