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How was Tet both a military loss and a political victory for North Vietnam?

How was Tet both a military loss and a political victory for North Vietnam?

Public Comments

1. Read your textbook!
2. The Tet Offensive - General Offensive, General Uprising, was a three-phase military campaign conducted between 30 January and 23 September 1968, by the combined forces of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF or derogatively, Viet Cong) and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during the Vietnam Conflict. The purpose of the operations, which were unprecedented in this conflict in their magnitude and ferocity, was to strike military and civilian command and control centers throughout the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and to spark a general uprising among the population that would then topple the Saigon government, thus ending the war in a single blow.
3. We destroyed the VC as an effective fighting force and inflicted heavy casualties on the NVA......On the other hand Tet occurred in the eyes of the American public as a nationwide revolt just after Westy's "we have turned the corner" speech. They did not realize the extent of the communist military defeat. So they lost support for the war. That was the political victory. The communist forces were decimated. The VC never recovered, and the NVA had teenagers in uniform for a year after. But the political view was of a strong and resolute, undefeated, enemy.
4. In Mao's little red book, military operations are divided into three phases. Phase I is primary the building of political strength, accompanied by selected assassinations and limited military operations of propaganda value. Phase II operations consolidate base areas and carefully attrit enemy forces. Phase III operations, with full-blown military attacks, are only to be the coup de grace once the situation has matured adequately. Giap overestimated his position and moved prematurely to Phase III in Tet 1968. The Viet Cong were destroyed as a fighting force and were set back largely to phase I operations, though in select areas they were able to continue phase II operations. They would never again have the strength for phase III operations. The NVA, at the same time, were hit hard, and had to revert to phase II for several months, and even then were severely weakened. This was not Giap's first mistake, nor would it be his last, but it was his worst. On the other hand, as the saying goes, "better lucky than good." Ho had been quite open about using Mao's strategy to eject the US, but few in the US were paying attention. While the Tet offensive was falling apart, the intelligentsia in the US were proving their lack of intelligence. They seem generally to have taken the phase III attack not as what it was but as "proof" that the Viet Cong and NVA were stronger than we'd thought. While Giap was wondering whether he'd lost the war, many in the US decided we had already lost, or were in an "unwinnable" war. Since the purpose of putting soldiers into the field is not to kill enemy soldiers but rather to kill the enemy's will to continue, that was it. Ho's strategy had won, just as had Westmoreland's. But Ho's was grand strategy, Westmoreland's only local strategy. To a large degree, one could say that while Westmoreland was fighting Giap, Giap was fighting Walter Cronkite. When Walter pronounced the war unwinnable, Johnson knew he'd lost the American people. I'd take some exception, though, to the idea that it was a military loss for Giap. Tactically, he got his hat handed to him, but that's for company-level officers. Generals concern themselves with strategy, and there's no distinction between the military and the political at that level. The two are the same. As a later example of the same idea, consider the Palestinian gains against Israel in the Intifada. Their greatest military weapon was the TV camera. They knew that a kid with a rock and an observer with a camera could beat an IDF soldier with a rifle any day, because the real fight was in the court of world opinion. All it took was a willingness to sacrifice a few kids, and that they were willing to do.
5. I recommend you go to pbs.org and watch the middle parts of the documentary about LBJ (available online). That should explain it.