Fair enough, your argument isn't without merit of course. I would LIKE to think most are savvy and learned enough to know the US obviously didn't win every battle it faced, much like any military and there's always lessons to be learned. I don't know who's pushing that concept the US never lost a fight as there's documented examples of battles it did indeed lose, it sounds more like a strawman argument to me. Unfortunately, you don't really learn without failure and mistakes made, and a lot of lessons within the US officer and enlisted corps, and military academies are based on that. One of the reasons the US military is so good at logistics nowadays because it learned the hard way over the past century or so just how much logistics is required and involved in any conflict.
I think it might be overcompensation or overreaction. Left I think often used Vietnam to "prove" that Communism stronk, US sucks, US military is weak and would be overcome by stronk Soviet forces... and then you have reaction to that which tries to "prove" that US invincible, US military undefeated, war lost by purely political factors...
Problem is that both positions are utter bollocks, and for multiple reasons. First, as Russians are finding out just now, a nation under arms is an incredibly difficult opponent to defeat. Attacker will, for reasons of logistics, only ever be able to mobilize a fraction of resources relative to overall resources available compared to what defender can bring to bear. And democratic societies are especially screwed in that regard as wars are a difficult sell, and so they will usually only go to wars that were either forced on them, or where a quick and bloodless victory is basically guaranteed. So while it is indeed true that US won far more than it lost tactically, and that war was lost largely due to political factors, saying - as Zachowon seems to imply - that war in Vietnam was lost solely due to political unrest in the US is essentially a revamping of the old Nazi "stab in the back" myth.
Thing is that
winning battles is useless. And that is something US leadership in Vietnam completely ignored. They literally used "battles won" and "kill-loss ratio" as a measure of success. But that is placing the cart before the horse, and I frankly have to ask
what exactly those guys were smoking. Must have been some really strong stuff. Because, as I said: you win by achieving objectives,
and ultimate objectives of every war are political. And because of this, while attacker has to win, defender only needs not to lose - and to do that, he just needs to
survive, even if he loses every single battle. You win by achieving
strategic objectives, and battles are merely a tool of that. That is why the Tet Offensive was really a defeat for the US, despite the fact that it was actually US victory by all conventional attritional measurements: it proved that neither the Viet Cong nor the North Vietnam were anywhere close to being defeated, despite all the US Generals' statements to the contrary.
So this:
Militarily.
Don't mess up that with everywhere aspect.
We have beaten, militarily since we became a power, every nation we faced.
The military winning battles did not win us some of the wars, but they showed that if we wanted to we could have.
Even
if true, completely misses the point and leads to a false conclusion. Because war, ultimately, is a political affair, not a military one. So to say that
The military winning battles did not win us some of the wars, but they showed that if we wanted to we could have.
is false, unless Zachowon is implying that the US will have been both willing and able to engage in literal campaigns of genocide in some of these cases.