A characteristic of ion mixing in the low temperature portion of the thermally assisted ion mixing regime is that the activation energy obtained from most experiments is in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 eV. These values are typically a factor of 4 to 10 lower than the vacancy migration energy of most elements. This discrepancy is maintained even when the ion mixing data is contrasted to the more comparable data from concentrated homogeneous alloys. It appears that an explanation of the ion mixing activation energy is not possible by radiation enhanced diffusion (RED) where, at the low temperature end of RED, defect annihilation is by direct vacancy-interstitial recombination and the predicted activation energy is Q = 0.5 EMv