Guerrilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare
Guerrilla warfare and attrition warfare are two war strategies that were used in the Vietnam War. The strategy of guerrilla warfare involves one side using a less traditional style of war to defeat a larger, more traditional army. This can include things like ambushes, sabotage, raids, and great mobility to overwhelm the enemy. In the Vietnam War, the fighting became more traditional as the war ended, but the North Vietnamese Army used guerrilla warfare for a large part of the war. The most major examples of guerrilla warfare are all of the hidden underground tunnels and rooms that the Viet Cong used to hide their soldiers from the American troops. American troops would often be shot at and they wouldn't know where it would be coming from. Attrition warfare is a strategy wears down the enemy to the point of collapse before finishing them off. When things weren't working for the United States in Vietnam, they decided to use a war of attrition strategy to eliminate the enemy. This method of warfare was very successful in the sense that they were killing North Vietnamese troops, but this method also caused many civilian casualties. For this reason, many protests broke out in the United States. The protesters argued that American troops were completely taking over the war, when their original goal was to simply help the South Vietnamese army stave off the communist regime of the Viet Cong. Attrition warfare was one of the many reasons the Vietnam War became a lost cause to the United States.