Except obviously not. With only about 125,000 regulars, and a total force of 450,000, mostly irregulars, the French lost. Overall ratio of casualties was 200,000 communist dead vs 130,000 anti communist, a ratio of 1.5-1 . 50% higher casualties as the comparatively poorly equipped militia force doesn't strike me as particularly bad performance.
This is getting really,
really tiring.
If you're going to make an argument like this, then carry it through to the next stage to see if it really supports your position.
Moving forward to the Vietnam war, and using Wikipedia to be consistent with you using it as a source (and because it's convenient):
North Vietnamese military dead:
849,018, and ~232,000
missing.
Other communist dead:
~11,021
South Vietnamese military dead:
254,256.
American military dead:
58,281.
Combined other allied dead:
20,943.
Total comparative losses:
~1.08 million, vs ~333,480 (some estimates say 60k more)
We're looking at a 3:1 ratio against the Communists here. If we were to only count the dead before the US pulled out, and South Vietnam was largely left standing alone, I wonder how much worse the kill/loss ratio was up to that point. It's fairly clear that if we count American vs North Vietnamese directly, the kill/loss ratio jumps to a hilarious 15:1.
North Vietnam won the war because they continued to be backed by Russia and China, while the South Vietnamese lost support. Even with all of that, the communists still suffered disproportionate losses on their path to victory.
Unfortunately for the CCP, infantry rushes and masses of military hardware shipped from Russia cannot win them an amphibious assault, or a full-scale war over the sea lanes.
Particularly relevant
to the scenario that this thread is about, is the fact that a war of deterrence against China is
not some nebulous forever war, with preposterous victory conditions (turn Afghanistan and Iraq into western democracies!) or that are politically forbidden (actually use superior firepower to level Hanoi.)
Successfully sinking enough of the PLAN to make an invasion of Taiwan impossible is a victory. China is a one-ocean nation, and they don't have something like the St. Lawrence Seaway to let them hide chunks of their fleet deep inside their own territory from hostile air power.
Successfully holding a blockade, which can be enforced a thousand kilometers away from Chinese territory, is a win condition. China can't get enough oil and coal in through land routes to feed its economy, much less a significant war effort.
In order to win, the US military does not need to fight a protracted war through mountainous jungles, some of the nastiest terrain in the world to fight in, it has to fight on the high seas, one of the most open environments where it is easiest to detect the enemy, especially if you are the world leader in satellite deployment and usage.
On top of all of this, we're no longer a nation where a handful of TV networks and big-name newspapers have a functional chokehold on public media. Everyone and anyone with a smartphone and internet service can be a reporter, and send footage that utterly shatters public narratives. The media isn't
powerless, but they don't have the ability to completely occlude anything violating their narrative like they did before.
Most importantly, is the amount of time it would take to win such a conflict. If it's fought kinetically, modern aircraft and missiles would be sinking ships horrifyingly quickly, and the decisive phase of the war would probably only last days or weeks. If it goes to the blockade as a pressure on the Chinese to get off of Taiwanese islands without open warfare, then it's a matter of months to a year, perhaps two on the outside.
If it was going to take years and decades to win a war of deterrence against China, yeah, I'd be seriously worried about political issues in the US forcing a withdrawal. The possibility of things turning out like in Vietnam would be very real, because Americans don't like wars with no clear path to victory, especially as the body-bags keep coming home.
But it wouldn't take years and decades. Either the naval and aerial slaughter happens swiftly and brutally, clearing the PLAN out of the ocean, and some portion of the USN depending on if the PLAN performs at the absolute pit of incompetence, or more like the better Soviet units in WWII, and inflict some stinging losses as they go down, or it's the waiting game over the blockade.
Neither side can replace military ships and aircraft fast enough to recover from a decisive defeat in the outset of such a conflict; modern multi-role jet aircraft roll off the assembly line in a matter of months or weeks, maybe days if someone accomplishes a modern industrial miracle, it isn't going to be hours and
minutes like Willow Run during WWII.
If the Chinese military performs a lot better than expected, they might manage to cripple or sink a couple of Supercarriers and do a number on their escorts. There is no sane expectation that they'll manage that without incurring serious losses of their own however.
Perhaps they'll manage to deal a crippling strike package to the US base on Okinawa, though again, they should be expected to take serious losses in doing so.
If they accomplish both of these things, what does that get them?
Three or four new Carrier Battle Groups get sent to deal with them, and US bases in South Korea and Japan can be used instead of Okinawa. It means a lot more use of tankers, which is expensive and time consuming, but the USAF and USN are
far from out of the fight.
What happens if they lose the cutting edge of their air force, and their coastal air defense gets smashed flat?
Their entire Navy gets sunk, and any part of their older inventory of aircraft that comes out to try to tangle with the USAF and USN Air Corps gets slaughtered with almost no ability to inflict meaningful harm in return.
The conflict is
massively stacked against the Chinese in almost every way. Political subversion is literally the only reasonable expectation they can have of victory, which is why if they are smart
they will never go to a hot conflict anyways, instead trying to use gray zone tactics against the West, as that's what the West is historically weak against.
If the CCP had actually kept their word about letting Hong Kong remain mostly self-governing, they might have actually been able to win Taiwan over through political subversion. After seeing the boot the CCP put on the neck of Hong Kong though, the Taiwanese lost any taste whatsoever for such a thing.