True, too, Giap did not possess the dazzling operational and tactical success of MacArthur at Inchon, or Rommel in North Africa, the stuff that passes for strategic brilliance in the West. Giap lost virtually every big unit engagement against the Americans, just as Washington lost most of his battles against the British Army. But as US General Creighton Abrams, the last US commander who fought against Giap once remarked, the big battles didn’t mean very much in broad scheme of things in the war in Vietnam. Giap’s keen awareness of this fact from the very outset gave him an enormous advantage in charting the war against the United States

For my part, I think a good case can be made that Giap not so much outfought as outthought the Americans. The PAVN’s commander in chief had an abiding conviction that while the military capabilities of the Americans were far superior to his own, their assessments of the nature of the conflict and what was required to prevail were precisely the opposite. He thought the Americans’ Achilles heel was wishful thinking, and he meant to exploit it.

Moreover, American fighting methods were counterproductive. American weapons, troops, and largesse could never bestow legitimacy on a corrupt and incompetent Saigon regime. And US firepower was so destructive that it killed hundreds of thousands of the civilians it was meant to “save” from the horrors of Communism.

The success of General William Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition hinged on the ability of American forces to destroy Giap’s regular army units in such staggering numbers that they could not be replaced fast enough to keep the war effort going. The Americans and South Vietnamese killed staggering numbers of Communist troops—1.1 million between 1954 and 1975—but it wasn’t even close to enough. Giap could always regulate the intensity of combat and therefore his casualty rate by withdrawing his main forces into sanctuaries and leaving the fighting to local guerrillas.