In our collective memory of the war in Vietnam, certain phrases have come to symbolize the self-delusion and the savagery of that traumatic episode in American history. The light at the end of the tunnel. Bomb them back into the Stone Age. That second line is generally attributed to the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, four-star Gen. Curtis LeMay. In fact, he denied ever saying it. It was actually the humorist Art Buchwald who coined the phrase to satirize LeMay’s philosophy of wreaking total destruction on the enemy.

But in his prime-time address to the nation on April 1^st on the state of the war in Iran, Donald Trump went much further than LeMay ever did – or didn’t – and this time using the platform of the presidency. After assuring us for the nth time that the end of the war, the light at the end of the tunnel was in view, he vowed that, “Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages (sic), where they belong.”

The specter of “another Vietnam” has hovered over all of America’s foreign wars in the half-century since the end of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The phrase was thrown around a lot during the wars in Central America in the early 1980s, but it was never accurate because the United States chose not to insert significant numbers of ground troops. It never really applied to the smaller invasions in Grenada and Panama later in the decade, and it was equally irrelevant to the first Gulf War in 1990, when the “Powell doctrine” dictated overwhelming force, realistic objectives, and a clear exit strategy. The Vietnam analogy was arguably more justified in George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, in the sense that it dragged on interminably and messily, with heavy American and allied losses, but even there the hostile regime was rapidly driven from power by the initial “shock and awe” phase of the invasion. Afghanistan may be the clearest analogue, since the 20-year-long misadventure there had neither realistic political objectives nor a clear exit strategy, and the eventual ugly withdrawal that ceded power back to the Taliban contained powerful echoes of the chaotic collapse of Saigon.

So for the most part, “another Vietnam” has been a facile and overblown cliché – until now. This isn’t to say that we will go down that same decade-long road in Iran; every war is different. Yet the first month of Operation Epic Fury is unnervingly reminiscent of where things stood by the end of the first month of the war in Vietnam, now that an expeditionary force of thousands of Marines and paratroopers of the 82^nd Airborne stand ready to put boots on the ground in the Persian Gulf, with reports indicating that the Pentagon is making plans for the dispatch of an additional 10,000 troops.

The fear that this will lead to the introduction of ground troops increased exponentially when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George within 24 hours of Trump’s speech, replacing him with Hegseth’s senior military assistant, Gen. Christopher LaNeve. Before taking up that post, George had been the highly respected chief of staff of Joint Forces Command and before that commander of the 82^nd Airborne. The timing of George’s peremptory removal – the latest in Hegseth’s ongoing purge of some 20 flag officers – strongly suggests that it was triggered by his opposition to whatever the administration plans to do next in Iran.

The Limits of Air Power

The immediate trigger for the war in Vietnam was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, passed with near-unanimous congressional approval, in response to a purported threat to U.S. naval forces in the South China Sea that proved to be almost entirely spurious. This time, of course, there was no such consultation with Congress and no equivalent resolution. In a Senate hearing on March 18^th, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard even declined to say whether U.S. intelligence agencies had found any evidence that Iran’s nuclear program posed an imminent threat to the United States. That wasn’t their job, she said, adding that it was entirely up to President Trump, who of course had already claimed that the program had been “obliterated” by the 12-day bombardment of Iran’s nuclear sites just nine months ago. (It might be noted in passing that Gabbard felt no such inhibitions about delivering the conclusions of the intelligence agencies on the threat to Taiwan – that “China likely prefers to set the conditions for an eventual peaceful reunification with Taiwan, short of conflict.” She had also said in her written statement that Iran had “made no effort to… rebuild their enrichment capability” since last June’s bombing campaign.)

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution set the stage for Operation Rolling Thunder, a punitive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, launched in March 1965, that eventually metastasized into ten years of sustained aerial bombardment of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on tiny Quang Tri alone, on the edge of the demilitarized zone – a province smaller than the state of Connecticut – than fell on Germany in the whole of World War Two. It was a textbook illustration of what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would call “maximum lethality,” and the month-long bombardment of Iran has been a pinprick by comparison.

There’s no denying the awesome power and destructiveness of that bombing campaign, or the courage, discipline, and skill of the pilots and aircrew who conducted it, and all of those things are equally true of the current campaign in Iran. Rolling Thunder wiped out railway lines, highways, bridges, factories, storage depots, anti-aircraft sites, and port facilities. It obliterated – to use one of Trump’s favorite words – the coastal city of Vinh, which served as the logistical hub for seaborne deliveries of military equipment from China and the Soviet Union through the port of Hai Phong destined for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the vital north-to-south supply line along the Vietnam-Laos border. The technological sophistication of the bombing campaign, like today’s, was breathtaking, coordinated by a command center in Thailand, Operation Igloo White, that housed the world’s most advanced IBM computer systems. Patrolling aircraft laden with advanced electronic gizmos transmitted real-time data to these computers, and airstrikes were called in as soon as targets were identified, with as little as two minutes “from the beep to the bomb.” The trail was strewn with state-of-the-art air-dropped sensors that could detect the rumble of a truck or the scent of human urine. Clandestine infiltration operations were even remotely directed by the first experimental use of the touch screen. But in the end, while it devastated North Vietnam’s physical infrastructure and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese combatants and civilians, the decade of bombing did nothing to break Vietnam’s will or prevent its eventual victory. The campaign only stiffened the will to resist. Air power alone has never settled a war.

Boots on the Ground

Once Rolling Thunder began, the next step, echoed by today’s deployment of a Marine expeditionary force to the Persian Gulf, was to dispatch 3,500 Marines to Da Nang, complemented by the Navy’s Seventh Fleet. Their purpose was to create a beachhead and a protective shield for the nearby US airbase, which served as the hub of the bombing campaign as well as the full rollout of Operation Ranch Hand, which would dump some 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides on Vietnam’s forests and farm lands.

Once those first Marines were installed in Da Nang, their presence became an object lesson in mission creep. When they inevitably came under attack, reinforcements followed, steadily expanding their area of operations, widening the defensive perimeter against mortar and rocket attacks and raids by enemy sappers, building out a string of secondary bases and port facilities, and moving on to offensive operations that reached all the way to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and mountainous border with Laos, fifty miles away. Within three years, the initial force of 3,500 American troops had morphed into almost 550,000.

There was overwhelming public backing for that early stage of the war in Vietnam. Even at the end of 1965, with almost 2,000 American dead, a Gallup poll showed public support running at 64 percent. Not until the summer of 1968, after the Tet Offensive, and with more than 30,000 American fatalities, did public support dip below 40 percent – the same, in other words, as the proportion that supported the war in Iran on day one.

Since then the numbers have continued to decline. By mid-March, only 37 percent of respondents in a Washington Post poll thought that the level of U.S. casualties was acceptable – and at that point the death toll stood at just seven. Now that the Marines and the 82^nd Airborne are in position, an Economist/YouGov poll conducted between March 27^th and 30^th shows just 14 percent in favor of the introduction of ground troops, with 62 percent opposed, and even fewer support the use of “large numbers” of troops. Even among Trump’s hard-core self-identified MAGA base, support for boots on the ground is at only 41 percent.

“You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know”

At this early stage of the war, the exact purpose of the Marine and Airborne deployment remains undefined. It may be designed simply to keep all future military options open, or as a performative show of muscle to back up whatever talks may or may not be underway between Iran and a motley crew of U.S. negotiators – real estate mogul and golfing buddy Steve Witkoff, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance – none of whom has any expert knowledge of Iran, its history, or its politics. Earlier talks with Witkoff and Kushner had shown some promise of a peaceful resolution of the nuclear problem, but they hadn’t actually bothered to take an American nuclear expert with them, had no grasp of the technical issues involved, and so reported to Trump that they saw no point in further negotiations – which prompted his decision to launch the war.

Whatever the initial point of their deployment, if the ground forces now arrayed against Iran are actually to use their specialized combat skills, it will most likely be for an operation akin to the creation of that first beachhead in Da Nang. This would entail the seizure of one or more of Iran’s militarized islands in the Persian Gulf, most notably its main oil export terminal on Kharg Island – “Forbidden Island,” as the Iranians call it – where petroleum is brought by undersea pipelines from three giant offshore oilfields, accounting for 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. The island is a little way up the Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies pass, as well as huge shipments of fertilizer and helium, essential inputs for global agriculture and microchip production.

“Take Kharg Island, this war is over,” declared Senator Lindsay Graham, the most hawkish of the Trump whisperers. “We could take it very easily.” And Trump agreed. However, he allowed, “It would also mean we had to be there for a while.” But at what cost? Because taking Kharg Island would present much greater military and logistical challenges than the first landings in Vietnam. Inevitably American troops would come under attack and could easily sustain hundreds of fatalities. It’s worth recalling that even seizing the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 against only token resistance resulted in 19 American dead.

Iran has not been sitting idly by all this time, of course. It has reportedly sowed the island with anti-personnel and anti-armor mines and beefed up multiple other layers of defenses along the rugged mountainous shoreline of the Gulf, which is less than 20 miles away at its closest point, with a labyrinth of cliffs, caves, inlets, and rocky outcrops that offer countless hard-to-detect places of concealment for boats, drones, artillery, and missiles – including the small, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles known as MANPADs. “They have a thousand miles of coastline, thousands of small boats,” says retired Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson, who was deputy chief of staff of the Multinational Task Force in Iraq. “There are just so many things they could do to make our lives miserable there, number one, and number two, to kill Americans.” The key point, he adds, is that “You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know how bad it is until you’re on the ground. And when that happens, it’s too late.” Which was, in a nutshell, how the Vietnam quagmire took shape.

While experienced mainstream military leaders like Anderson worry about likely casualties, the most influential military figures in MAGA circles go much further. Opposition to the war from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Megyn Kelly has been well publicized. But more damning are the fears of pre-eminent MAGA military insiders like Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, and a major Republican Party donor. Speaking in late March at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas, Prince conjured a nightmarish vision of what would happen if Trump sent in ground troops. “My real concern,” he said, “is that if they try to put boots on the ground and force the Strait of Hormuz, you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks. And I don’t think people are really prepared for that.”

Enemies Have a Long Memory

Success in war is about much more than firepower. It demands a clear understanding of the enemy’s history, ideology, culture, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses – little of which, other than its military and technological inferiority, appears to have been taken into account in launching the current assault on Iran. For most Americans, and apparently for the current crop of policymakers, modern Iranian history begins in 1979, with the Islamic revolution and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. But for the Iranian regime, and for serious students of geopolitical history, it goes back at least to 1953, when the CIA and Britain’s MI6 joined forces to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh for the sin of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry. Arguably it goes back even earlier, to 1908, when the Anglo Persian Oil Company, the predecessor of today’s BP, gained majority control of Iranian oil reserves. (One of the latest Iranian attacks on a foreign target, on Tuesday, was a BP facility in Iraqi Kurdistan – surely no accident; the Iranians have long memories.)

Similarly in Vietnam, national memory did not start with Marine landings in Da Nang. It goes back more than a millennium, celebrating repeated wars of resistance to invasion from China, its powerful northern neighbor. It encompasses almost a hundred years of brutal French colonial occupation, punctuated by a Japanese occupation during World War Two, until the French were driven out in 1954 by the masterful tactics of Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu. After repeated friendly overtures to President Harry Truman by Ho Chi Minh, all of which went unanswered, the Americans threw their full support behind the French, their loyal and long-suffering allies in the Second World War, granting them exemption from the postwar process of global decolonization. The Vietnamese remembered that too, and spent decades, like the Iranians, honing their strategies of resistance. Iran has been doing likewise for 47 years now, since the triumph of the Islamic Revolution.

Wartime success also rests heavily on understanding the difference between tactical and strategic intelligence, the first being no substitute for the second. The Israelis in particular have intelligence capabilities that were inconceivable in the Vietnam era, apparently allowing them to track the minutest movement or momentary communication by Iran’s political and military leadership and target them systematically for assassination. But it’s a huge leap from that to the assumption, which Israel in particular seems to have made, that this would lead to the collapse of the regime. The result seems to have been just the opposite: the ascent of a more radical clerical and military leadership, embittered and vengeful (not least as a result of the deaths of several members of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khameini’s immediate family), locked in what it sees as an existential battle, with a nuclear deterrent being the only way ultimately to guarantee its survival.

Again, this process of radicalization while under attack has a direct parallel in Vietnam. America never lost its fixation on Ho Chi Minh as the incarnation of Vietnamese leadership, and Gen. Giap as its military mastermind. But in fact, by the early 1960s, the real power in Hanoi had shifted toward the more doctrinaire Stalinist Le Duan, who foresaw the likelihood of an American invasion and prepared accordingly, in close alliance not with Giap but with a more hardline general, Nguyen Chi Thanh. It was Thanh, not Giap, who was the true architect of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Perhaps the most stunning illustration of the U.S. failure to understand the political dynamics of its adversary is that the massively detailed index to the 446-page memoir of General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, contains not a single reference to Le Duan, and the text itself has just a glancing two-sentence reference to Gen. Thanh.

Plans for war, as the cliché has it, never survive first contact with the enemy, who always has agency. Both in Vietnam and Iran, the revolutionary leadership knew that it would always be massively outgunned. But both had strategic advantages that favored asymmetric warfare, with tactics based on patience, attrition of the enemy’s forces and its political will, and a willingness to absorb heavy casualties. The Vietnamese were masters of this. The most important card they held was control of the port of Hai Phong, where a steady stream of supplies – trucks, anti-aircraft weapons, and small arms – arrived from China and the Soviet Union, bound for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While American generals chafed to bombard and blockade Hai Phong, they were always held back by the politicians’ fear of provoking direct conflict with the two great Communist powers. Iran now holds a card of comparable value, if different character, in its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz and thereby of much of the global economy – not to mention the Achilles’ heel of all American governments, the price of gasoline.

Fighting in Hostile Terrain

Above all, though, the outcome of war is determined by the quirks of geography, be it the tree lines at Gettysburg, the open fields of Flanders, or the barren, rocky wastes of Afghanistan. In Vietnam, it was the forbidding, densely forested mountains that sheltered the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “To seize and control the mountains is to solve the whole problem of Vietnam,” Giap said. “We will entice the Americans close to the border [with Laos] and bleed them without mercy.” Which is exactly what happened.

Every battlefield has its own distinctive features, of course. There are no rainforests in Iran. But the country is five times larger than Vietnam. Its population is 93 million, six times the size of North Vietnam’s in 1965. It is a vast land of mountains, high desert plateaus, and a long, rocky coastline that protects Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz. An attack on shipping by a single drone, which can be produced for a few thousand dollars with a 3-D printer hidden undetected in a garage or basement, is enough to paralyze ship traffic, and the same is true of the fear of mines, whether or not they actually exist.

Assuming that Kharg Island, or perhaps some other smaller island in the strait, is the likeliest target of the Marine expeditionary forces, their amphibious landing craft would have to thread the same path through potential minefields, run the gauntlet of the same low-tech coastal defenses, heading westward through the strait, that commercial vessels have to contend with as they head east. And once they had seized Kharg Island, the Marines would be sitting ducks for attack, just like their predecessors in Da Nang. Military experts estimate that casualties could easily run into the hundreds, for which even the most fervent of Trump supporters have approximately zero appetite.

And none of this even deals with the greatest challenge of all, the nuclear threat posed by Iran, which Trump now blithely dismisses as irrelevant, even though it was the primary justification for the war. This presents the problem of retrieving Iran’s buried stockpile of some 440 kilograms (970 pounds) of 60 percent enriched uranium. Once this is further enriched to 90 percent purity, it’s enough to manufacture 10 or 12 nuclear bombs (and 60 percent enrichment, Gen. Anderson notes, actually takes you 99 percent of the way to that target). Most of this stockpile is presumed to be entombed in deep tunnels beneath the Zagros Mountains near Isfahan, although according to the International Atomic Energy Agency some of it is at Natanz and perhaps also at Fordow, the other two nuclear sites bombed last year. There’s also a stock of less highly enriched uranium lurking somewhere in the wings – some of it to five percent, some to 20 percent, but all of it potentially upgradable through a small clandestine enrichment program.

Military experts use sober language to describe a raid on Isfahan: it would be “extremely challenging.” It would involve sending in a highly specialized Special Forces unit trained in identifying and handling nuclear material; creating a defensible airstrip for heavy-lift cargo planes with excavating equipment and engineers to penetrate the rubble and reach the tunnels; sustaining air and satellite support; creating a defensible perimeter for the operation (and presumably a medevac facility for the wounded); warding off inevitable attacks by local forces; locating the heavy steel canisters that house the uranium, which are like large scuba tanks; being sure you get all of them, since missing even 10 percent of the uranium would still leave enough for one bomb; making sure they’re not dropped, damaged, or banged together; lugging them away under fire and airlifting them out of the country before finally decontaminating everything and everyone they’ve touched. To the lay observer, “extremely challenging” sounds like a serious understatement.

Taking Isfahan would dwarf any of the prime strategic targets that the U.S. identified during the war in Vietnam, none of which it ever succeeded in capturing or destroying. Years of aerial attacks, and eventually a ground invasion of Cambodia supported by artillery and massive bombing by giant B-52s – the newest generation of which are now running bombing raids on Iran out of the RAF’s Fairford airbase in England – all failed to destroy the command center of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the remote village of La Hap in Laos, or COSVN in Cambodia – the Central Office for South Vietnam – which U.S. planners saw as a kind of Pentagon-in-the-Jungle.

The United States took decades to recover from the trauma of Vietnam. It is still smarting from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. But failure in Iran could be even more consequential to the world order. There has been no regime change, no matter how much Trump may finesse the meaning of the term to cover Iran’s newest batch of clerical and military leaders. The nuclear threat remains unresolved, and may, in the hands of these new, undefeated, and vengeful leaders, grow potentially more serious than before. Even if the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, that would do no more than restore the status quo ante – and not even that, since the Gulf states’ oil and gas facilities so far damaged by Iranian attacks will take months or years to repair.

If there has been a single beneficiary from the conflict so far, it’s probably Russia, which has reaped an unexpected windfall through the radical depletion of stocks of exorbitantly expensive Patriot, THAAD, and other aerial interceptors, limiting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against ballistic and cruise missiles.

It took eight years for sophisticated negotiators, led by Henry Kissinger, to extricate the United States from Vietnam. The architects of that war came to be known as “the Best and the Brightest.” Sadly, that is not a phrase that immediately springs to mind in describing the planners of what the president now likes to call our current “little journey” into Iran.

George Black, a frequent contributor to the Washington Spectator, is the author of The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam (Knopf, 2023).

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