The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War has been credited as one of the greatest foreign policy and military disasters in American history. The country decided to enter in to the war with little knowledge of how fight the type of war that was being waged in Vietnam or with any real idea on how to defeat the North Vietnamese. Kennedy believed that a war of defensive attrition would be enough to cause the North Vietnamese to back down.
The U.S. sent troops and focused on body counts with little idea of how much money was being spent or how much ground was being taken. The war of attrition did little to cause Ho Chi Minh to back down and he even said that it did not matter if 10 of his men died for every 1 man he killed because he would still outlast the will of the Americans. The U.S. troops also did little to shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail and therefore could never fully get the upper hand over the North Vietnamese.
When the U.S. pulled out of the country the negotiated peace agreement did not last and the North Vietnamese resumed their attacks. This time South Vietnam was left to fight for themselves. They were unable to hold off the Viet Cong and Saigon fell. The Vietnam War cost 58,220 American lives with more than 150,000 wounded. The cost of the war was over $110 billion and as of 2013 the United States government continued to pay $22 billion a year to the Vietnam veterans, their families and survivors. The war was costly mistake for the U.S. in terms of lives and money and by the end, the United States had little to show for it and they had a public that would be unwilling to intervene militarily in other countries for years.