Death before dismount? : mechanization, force employment, and counterinsurgency outcomes in Iraq
Recent research suggests that heavily mechanized armies perform worse in counterinsurgency campaigns than those that use fewer vehicles. The U.S. military’s 2007 operations in Iraq, however, present an empirical quandary for the mechanization hypothesis: a vehicle-heavy army proved able to suppress an insurgency, allowing Iraqi leaders to work towards a long-term political solution. This paper argues that force employment, not mechanization, drives counterinsurgency outcomes—what matters is not that armies have many vehicles or soldiers, but how they choose to use them. When heavily mechanized forces change their tactics and doctrine to line up with counterinsurgency principles, shifting from an enemy-centric to a population-centric approach, outcomes dramatically improve while military-wide mechanization levels remain constant. Using an original dataset, this paper conducts a large-n regression analysis of the impacts of mechanization at the provincial level in Iraq, and finds little support for the mechanization hypothesis. A subsequent comparative case study, of the heavily mechanized 3 Armored Cavalry Regiment’s operations in Tall Afar and the light infantry 82 Airborne Division’s operations in Fallujah, indicate that force employment rather than mechanization is a key indicator of counterinsurgency outcomes. The finding has important implications for force structure policy, as it indicates that mechanized forces can indeed conduct successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Thesis Advisor: Roger D. Petersen Title: Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
How Democracies Lose Small Wars
How Democracies Lose Small Wars. By Gil Merom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 310p. $65.00 cloth, $22.99 paper. The essence of Gil Merom's argument in this book is that democratic strong actors cannot win small wars because these states are constrained by society to avoid the sacrifice—in both sustained and inflicted casualties—necessary to win: “My argument is that democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory. They are restricted by their domestic structure, and in particular by the creed of some of their most articulate citizens and the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such citizens. Other states are not prone to lose small wars, and when they do fail in such wars it is mostly for realist reasons” (p. 15). Merom adds that “[e]ssentially, what prevents modern democracies from winning small wars is disagreement between state and society over expedient and moral issues that concern human life and dignity…. Achieving a certain balance between … the readiness to bear the cost of a war and the readiness to exact a painful toll from others—is a precondition for succeeding in war” (p. 19).
Hume: Inventor of a New Task for Philosophy
LTHOUGH EVERY GREAT PHILOSOPHER has been rendered into diverse characters, David Hume has suffered this fate to an extraordinary degree. At one extreme he is described as the most devastating skeptic, who not only destroyed the pretenses of traditional philosophy but also showed that knowledge of any sort is an illusion. At the other extreme Hume is turned into a dogmatic empiricist who believed that mankind could achieve incontrovertible truth. And for each version, some support can be extracted from his writings. Hume the skeptic has been discovered in the Treatise saying that “all is uncertain and . . . our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measure of truth or falsehood,” and that “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our natures.’’’ In his Dialogues on Natural Religion, he declares that “if reason is to be considered in an abstract view,” it “furnishes invincible arguments against itself,” and “we could never retain any conviction or assurance on any subject.’y2 On the strength of such passages, Hume is claimed not only as a skeptic, but also as the progenitor of analytic philosophy, because he is supposed to have denied the validity of any positive doctrine in philosophy and sentenced