Vietnam War

===Bombing of Laos===
{{Main|Laotian Civil War}}
Bombing was not restricted to North Vietnam. Other aerial campaigns, such as [[Operation Barrel Roll]], targeted different parts of the Viet Cong and PAVN infrastructure. These included the Ho Chi Minh trail supply route, which ran through Laos and Cambodia. The ostensibly neutral Laos had become [[Laotian Civil War|the scene of a civil war]], pitting the [[Kingdom of Laos|Laotian government]] backed by the US against the Pathet Lao and its North Vietnamese allies.

Massive aerial bombardment against the Pathet Lao and PAVN forces were carried out by the US to prevent the collapse of the Royal central government, and to deny the use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos, nearly equal to the 2.1&nbsp;million tons of bombs the U.S. dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II, making Laos the most heavily bombed country in history relative to the size of its population.<ref name="KiernanTaylor">{{Cite journal |last1=Kiernan |first1=Ben |author-link=Ben Kiernan |last2=Owen |first2=Taylor |date=26 April 2015 |title=Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications |url=http://apjjf.org/2015/13/16/Ben-Kiernan/4313.html |journal=The Asia-Pacific Journal |volume=13 |issue=17 |id=4313 |access-date=18 September 2016|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230326111723/https://apjjf.org/Ben-Kiernan/4313.html|archive-date=March 26, 2023}}</ref>

The objective of stopping North Vietnam and the Viet Cong was never reached. The [[Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force]] [[Curtis LeMay]], however, had long advocated saturation bombing in Vietnam and wrote of the communists that "we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age".<ref name=Hastings/>{{Rp|328}}