PATRIOT HYPE, PATRIOT REALITY

A new pic­ture of the Patriot missile’s per­for­mance in Gulf War II is emerg­ing — and it’s not the happy scene we were all shown on tele­vi­sion last spring.
As recently as last week, the Army claimed that it had a per­fect inter­cept record dur­ing Operation Iraqi Freedom. But that’s “at best, a wild twist­ing of the facts,” Victoria Samson, with the Center for Defense Information (CDI), says.
She’s exam­ined a new report from the Army’s 32d Army Air and Missile Defense Command which looks at how the Patriots per­formed. And that study con­tra­dicts the military’s bal­lis­tic boos­t­er­ism.
“According to the Army’s own report, 23 Iraqi mis­sile launches are doc­u­mented. Subtract the nine reported inter­cepts, and take away the one Iraqi mis­sile that blew itself up shortly after launch and the four which were out of Patriot range, and that leaves nine mis­siles which should have been inter­cepted and were not. A 100% inter­cep­tion rate glosses over what actu­ally hap­pened in the bat­tle­field,” she writes. (empha­sis mine)
CDI’s analy­sis — includ­ing a day-​​by-​​day break­down of OIF’s mis­sile bat­tles — here.

October 23rd, 2003 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.