TPM Reader EK notes a recent study, co-written by scholars at Princeton and West Point, which shows that great powers have become less and less likely to win counter-insurgencies as their economies have been more industrialized and their militaries more mechanized. At one level, this is kind of intuitive. One of the key points of the study is that militaries focused on mechanization and technology aren't very well equipped to do the sort of information gathering upon which successful counter-insurgency is based.

Here's the study itself and here's a Washington Post write-up of the study from earlier this year.

Here's the abstract ...

Empirical evidence suggests that Great Powers and weak states alike are increasingly unable to wage successful counterinsurgency campaigns. We argue that this decline can be explained by rising levels of mechanization within state militaries. Unlike their earlier counterparts, modern militaries possess force structures that inhibit the creation of information-gathering networks among local populations. Mechanized militaries therefore struggle to wield their power discriminately, pushing fence-sitters into the insurgency. We test this claim using a new dataset of 238 insurgencies (1800-2000) and a microlevel comparison of two U.S. Army Divisions in Iraq (2003-04). We find that mechanization is associated with a decreasing probability of incumbent victory; that regime- and power-based explanations only account for nineteenth century outcomes; and that oft-cited factors such as terrain or ethnolinguistic divisions are largely unconnected to outcomes in counterinsurgency warfare.