Why didn't he? Was he weak like Putin that he was losing and had to resort to nukes?
A single throwaway sentence doesn't prove much. Let me help you with a very simple ORBAT:
You can also look at Linebacker II which went
even worse for the US which had an abysmal 6 to 27 kill ratio by their own numbers.
And why restrict it to air to air? If you go by total aircraft loss ratios, 10k vs. 100 isn't a good look no matter how you slice it.
How is it semantics? It's a huge difference - it is basically what Russia was doing in Donbass in 2014-2022, vs what Russia did in 2022 onwards. Any intellectualy honest person would understand that Russian actions in 2014-2022 are different than Russian actions post 2022.
PAVN wasn't fighting in North Vietnam on its own territory as an insurgency. It was fighting conventionally at the North-South border and projecting power into South Vietnam with gray zone warfare. This is very important because an insurgency relies on local support and logistics. South Vietnam was not the territory of North Vietnam - it was a sovereign state governed by the Republic of Vietnam.
The Taliban was fighting in its own territory as an insurgency. Completely incomparable situation.
You also said something else:
Yet it lost the Battle of Khe Sanh, a 40k on 40k conventional battle, with more casualties (2.5-3.5k KIA vs. 2.4k KIA) and losing Khe Sanh Combat Base. Losing more soldiers + losing territory + losing stated objectives is an unambiguous loss.
It wasn't because they didn't care about it either, they tried to retake Khe Sahn 5 years later in Operation Dewey Canyon II. The end result: total collapse of their offensive and the US-South Vietnamese forces losing in a 1:5 KIA ratio.
I must keep pointing this out to you since you keep trying to reduce Vietnam to a counterinsurgency war and even proclaimed here that it was the insurgency that wore the US down as you wrote here:
The North Vietnamese military did not 'go into hiding' and fight 'rare force on force engagements, which it overwhelmingly lost' if it shot down 10k planes while losing around 100 and fought multiple 10k+ on 10k+ conventional battles with 1:1 or better KIA ratios without losing territory.