They've really played the long game for their comeback but in more ways than one the ghosts of the confederacy are haunting the US to this day. This is more than LARPing for many of those people.
A coworker once told me that the South was doomed because the North had a larger industrial base. I said that sounded like wisdom in English, but it was a joke in Vietnamese.
The south was doomed because a significant portion of their labor hated them. They also had terrible industrial capacity, no international legitimacy, and no asymmetric advantage.
It's a lot more like when Cambodia invaded Vietnam than when America did.
I suppose when that industrial output needs to cross an ocean. Not so much when it just needs to cross a river.
Apples and oranges.
Vietnamese had been fighting for twenty years against the French and Japanese. The South thought they would achieve victory with a few battles.
The north Vietnamese had China and the Soviet Union backing them. The US south had basically nobody.
https://richardpoe.substack.com/p/how-the-british-caused-the-american
Many people believe that the British government actively pushed the south to secede in order to weaken the US.
Not to mentioned the U.S. deployed something like 2.7 million people to Vietnam over the years. ~58,000 U.S. soilders died. Somewhere between 1-3 million people died in the war. Everyone lost that war. With deaths between 95%-98% not being U.S. troops though... It's hard to argue when someone says the U.S. didn't lose. We should have never been there, it was horrible.. but any proud boy I meet in a bar who knows the numbers is going to call that a win... Because they don't care about anything other than how many "bad people" died, and they consider anyone who looks/talks/acts different, bad people.
Half men, heh.
Half horse.
"My mom's my mom, my dad's a horse, the two of them had intercourse, I'm traumatized by their divorce." - Half Horse / Half Man
100% dumbass
I believe it was a transitional time for warfare. Muskets weren't much better than earlier technology, their strength was that you didn't need much training at all to use them as opposed to a bow or sword.
In earlier wars, if often came down to whoever broke and fled first, a smaller army fighting for beliefs rather than a Lord could beat a bigger army.
But they undervalued newer technology that could cause havoc by relatively untrained people. It wasn't the same as WW1 where this really showed, but it was definitely on the way.
There's a story that says that a Northern quartermaster didn't want repeating rifles because he didn't want his troops wasting bullets.
More likely the repeating rifles were more expensive and heavier.
There's definitely an argument to that logic. 10 bullets in one person may as well be 1. People don't fall down instantly so a volley is likely to do little to a column of troops like Napoleon liked to use.
But I know pretty much nothing about the American civil war, and it sounds like the north was able to produce far more than the south. So probably a bad decision.
