This has to be some kind of joke. The Air Force commissions a study on the Israeli-Hizballah war, and who do they pick to do it?

Hard-left anti-military writer William Arkin, who wrote in the Washington Post that US troops are a bunch of mercenary rapists and murderers who are lucky they aren’t being spat upon.

Is anyone awake at the Air Force? Book Faults Israeli Air War in Lebanon.

JERUSALEM, Oct. 13 — A study of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war commissioned by the United States Air Force and to be published this month concludes that Israel’s use of air power was of diminishing value as the fight dragged on because it was used without enough discrimination.

Although the war was widely criticized in Israel and abroad for relying too heavily on the air force, the study argues that air power remains the most flexible tool in fighting groups like Hezbollah, because ground forces alone could not have achieved Israel’s aims. Israel’s error, the study concludes, was insufficient discernment in its airstrikes.

By bombing too many targets of questionable importance for its aims, and not explaining why it bombed what it did, Israel lost the war for public opinion, according to the author of the study, William M. Arkin, an expert in assessing bomb damage. “Israel bombed too much and bombed the wrong targets, falling back upon cookie-cutter conventional targeting in attacking traditional military objects,” Mr. Arkin wrote. “Individual elements of each target group might have been justified, but Israel also undertook an intentionally punishing and destructive air campaign against the people and government of Lebanon.”

In this new kind of warfare against terrorism, fighting a nonstate force like Hezbollah that occupies a large part of a fragile state, Lebanon, the battle for public opinion is as important as any military victory, Mr. Arkin argues.

This kind of war, using air power and special operations, will dominate the future, which is why the Air Force commissioned this study to learn from “the first sustained precision air campaign mounted by a country other than the United States,” he said in a telephone interview this week.

Mr. Arkin’s book, “Divining Victory: Airpower in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War,” will be published this month by the Air University Press, based at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It is expected to influence Air Force strategy and teaching.

For much more information on this creep and his many connections with Soros-funded far-left groups: LGF search: William Arkin.