This reads like a rationalisation to me. I would guess that the forces that beat the US in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese & the Viet Cong, were far more parsimon

This reads like a rationalisation to me. I would guess that the forces that beat the US in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese & the Viet Cong, were far more parsimonious in their resource use and put effort into extracting their equipment. Of course, in the Vietnam War, the corporations back in the US who were making huge profits in supplying the war weren't at all worried about equipment being wasted overseas and not returned. And so we're back at the US military industrial complex and all of its unethical madness, famously satirised by Heller in Catch-22.