Troops or Tanks? Rethinking COIN mechanization and force employment

Are some conventional military units better equipped to conduct counterinsurgency (COIN) operations than others? COIN theorists and practitioners disagree about mechanization’s impact on COIN effectiveness. We suggest that mechanization is not the critical determinant of COIN effectiveness. Rather, mechanization’s effects vary based on a unit’s force employment approach within local scope conditions. To test our hypothesis, we explore how mechanization impacts COIN operations in Ramadi and Basra and find that force employment is the critical determinant in COIN effectiveness. We introduce an adaptive force employment hypothesis that outlines how mechanization includes costs to exposing dismounted troops and benefits in information-sharing, conditional on local insurgent strength. This hypothesis suggests that mechanized forces provide significant benefits to counterinsurgents when clearing high strength insurgents, outweighing benefits from dismounted civilian interaction. Following successful clearance operations when government control is increased and insurgent strength is reduced, requirements for armored protection decrease while civilian tips become increasingly important to target remaining insurgents. In the hold and build stages, counterinsurgents can increasingly rely on dismounted troops.