Marduk, I know some things may not have filtered over to Poland through US media and culture yet, but very few people of any political persuasion have anything positive to say about the Veitnam war or DC and the military's actions in Veitnam. Only motards in the military, or copium huffing Silent gen/Boomer who cannot admit the US military did not win that conflict.
I know you want to dismiss the public still having a serous negative view of the US actions in Veitnam as just a "Lefty/fringe thing", but the article itself laid out that it still affects recruiting numbers and attitudes of adults who are raising the kids the military wants to pull in.
The military has tried to ignore, deflect, and spin what happened in Veitnam for decades, because directly addressing the issue and it's affects on recruiting would mean swallowing a lot of pride and digging out skeletons DC wants to stay buried.
I think we have been over this. Your particular little segment of independent voters does not represent anything near what the military would consider the secondary, or even tertiary "target audience" for its recruitment efforts, as if they are as set in their very general, and politically backed anti-military views... well, nothing they can realistically say or do will dramatically change the amount of bang they will get from that group (letting you feel the satisfaction of having your bias confirmed by its very target is not considered the goal of recruitment efforts) so why would they bother. Many other Americans here have quite different opinions on the topic, according to mentioned cultural dividing lines and media preferences.
The right hates centralized government and mistrusts three letters agencies, with some believing they need abolition. There's further resentment and mistrust about the erosion of the middle class to enrich people who don't live in the US or its territories. This was disgraceful and a mistake. Those people are neither Americans by birth or service nor pledge and thus should never matter to any calculation of how to enrich American citizens beyond their existence as a means to achieve that end. Vietnam, like the cold war in general, was an excuse to enrich wealthy communists and bureaucratic state fanatics who pretended to be conservatives, their buddies in big pharma and Lockheed Martin. Thus viewed, the Vietnam war as a shameful act of national prostitution that severely harmed America's prosperity.
Conservatives are like "Foreign wars bad" and "deep state bad."
And Neocons think it was great.
The left hates the war because MUH OPPRESSED RICE FARMERS and other bullshit that doesn't matter.
The first two positions are incredibly based, even if the second one lacks nuance, and the last two are the positions of an idiot. Communist or Catholic, Rice farmers in Nam don't matter unless Americans can benefit from their farming. Their personal afflictions at the hands of communism are only relevant to America's interests because the French were disgusting frog monsters propping up regime after regime of drug lords. Our association with that was disgraceful.
Although I'll admit America missed a fine opportunity to use Nam as a gigantic dagger in China's back, given just how many Cheecoms they took out during that one abortive invasion, oh well.
Of course its politics. However may be just my in-detail interest of the topic, but very general sentiments about these kind of things from the conservative side are just non-serious and also, as such, vulnerable to arguments by neocons and the like. The problem with them is not wars in general, interventions, or lack of adoption of childish isolationist ideas.
The problem with modern interventionists is that even if they have a good point, the interventions they lead in practice include so many compromises with all sorts of money grifting parties, random naive idiots and tools, and worse yet, outright malicious, ideologically motivated parties who want them to fail spectacularly, that they possibly out-weight whatever value the plan may have had originally, if they don't limit it so much that success is logically excluded out of possible results.
And in case some success still appears, or just falls into their lap, they just ignore the opportunity, like the issue with China you mentioned - and then it happened again in 1991, with peace dividend instead of "one down, one to go", which has directly led to the current, far tougher situation with China.
So overall, the problem isn't that they are doing things, the problem is that they are doing things wrong, usually in ways that bring requiring major costs for limited, if any result.
