The USA lost the Vietnam War because of failures in the way it understood and then fought the war. The US government saw the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its Vietcong allies through a Cold War prism and misread both the nature of the conflict and its own long-term chance of success.
Seeing the guerrilla war against the French as a Communist insurgency rather than a nationalistic campaign for independence the US government assumed it could defeat its enemies by a campaign of ‘coercive diplomacy’. The US military leadership believed that an air campaign against North Vietnamese targets would bring the NVA and Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table.
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