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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.
While critical of how Israel used its air force, Mr. Arkin defends the flexibility of air power in counterterrorism. Although Israel was retaliating for a Hezbollah raid that captured two soldiers and killed others, he considers the war pre-emptive. He said Israel used the raid as a pretext to destroy most of Hezbollah’s longer-range Syrian and Iranian missiles and launchers, which posed the largest threat to Israel.
In a post-9/11 world, Mr. Arkin said, the likelihood of the United States’ engaging in another ground war like Iraq is very small. A better model is the fight against the
Taliban in 2001, he said, emphasizing air power, special operations and covert action. The 2006 conflict was only the second war of “pure counterterrorism,” he said, which is why the Pentagon wanted to study it.
Having examined the results of the war on the ground and from satellite photos, Mr. Arkin has strong criticism. He says that a more restrained use of air power on more carefully chosen targets would have been more effective in reaching Israel’s strategic goals and would have reduced the sympathy for Hezbollah. Israel was far too quiet about defending target choices, in the attacks and afterward, he said.
Capt. Noa Meir, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military, said it could not comment on a study it had not seen.
Mr. Arkin argues that too much concern for the legality of individual targets was counterproductive. Waiting for more than a day into the war to bomb Dahiye, Hezbollah’s leadership district in southern Beirut, for instance, no doubt saved civilian lives, but it also guaranteed that Hezbollah’s leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, had time to escape.
Mr. Arkin rejected the conventional critique “that air power somehow served to distort Israel’s military response and limit Israel’s capabilities.”
“Israel did what it was capable of doing because the ground forces weren’t ready to do what people thought they wanted them to do,” he said. “They weren’t trained, equipped or ready.”
Israel’s ground forces, including artillery, “caused a tremendous amount of the damage,” he said. Yet Hezbollah kept firing rockets until the end and survived, now rearmed by Iran and Syria. Israeli ground forces fought indifferently, the captured Israelis remain in Hezbollah custody, and Israel’s reputation was damaged, he said.
In debating proportionate use of force and civilian casualties, Mr. Arkin says it is a mistake to rely too heavily on witnesses “as a means of judging war crimes.”
He said Hezbollah fought effectively. “But when human rights organizations and much of the international community showed up or commented, they seemed to act as if the force Israel was battling was nonexistent,” he wrote. “As for the critique of air power, the connotation was that somehow a full-fledged ground war with the same mission against this same tricky and dug-in force would have been both more successful and less destructive.”
Once a government decides that it is fighting a moral war, “debating the morality of individual strikes is just wrong,” he said. “If you bomb the right target for a specific military purpose, it’s intrinsically legal.”
In the end, Mr. Arkin contends, the Israeli military concluded that it could prosecute a fierce and pre-emptive air war despite criticism. “Pre-emption was the theoretical underpinning of the recent attack on Syria, too,” he said, referring to Israel’s attack last month on what it reportedly believed was a nuclear facility supplied by North Korea. “Though given a bad name in Iraq, pre-emption is accepted by the military, and it thrives in the Syria attack and in the ongoing discussions about Iran.”
Mr. Arkin draws two main lessons. The United States and Israel should “practice greater transparency about what you’re doing, about what you’re bombing and why you’re bombing it.”
Second, militaries must properly judge the past. The United States Air Force hated the Kosovo war, which in fact succeeded in its military and political objectives, but loved the Iraq wars, which did not, he said. “We’re looking into a future that involves pre-emption and wars against terrorism” — wars like Israel’s.
Mr. Arkin was a military adviser to
Human Rights Watch, analyzing the American bombing campaign during the 1999 Kosovo war. He was a military adviser to a
United Nations mission to Israel and Lebanon in 2006.
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