“HUNDREDS” OF PATRIOT FALSE ALARMS

Killing two British pilots and shoot­ing down a U.S. Navy fighter was just the begin­ning. The Patriot mis­sile defense sys­tem had a slew of prob­lems dur­ing the Iraq inva­sion — prob­lems which are only now slowly com­ing to light.
“Spurious ‘ghost’ mis­sile tracks showed up on Patriot Missile bat­tery radars hun­dreds of times before and dur­ing the inva­sion, caus­ing chaos and con­fu­sion as sol­diers strug­gled to deter­mine the real from the false,” notes KTVT-​​TV reporter Robert Riggs, who’s been lead­ing the press’ investigation of the anti-​​missile sys­tem. “Soldiers oper­at­ing the multi-​​billion sys­tems had only mal­func­tion­ing cell phones with which to com­mu­ni­cate with other bat­ter­ies in often-​​futile efforts to learn whether tar­gets were real.“
All that con­trasts — big time — from offi­cial accounts of the Patriot’s per­for­mance. The U.S. Army, in a recent report, claimed the sys­tem had a “per­fect record.” The British Ministry of Defence, in its run-​​down of a Patriot “friendly fire” inci­dent, tried to pin the blame on poor American “fir­ing doc­trine and train­ing,” the Register notes. Human error, in other words.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, says Riggs.

Some 12 hours before the shoot down of the [British plane], accord­ing to logs of the air bat­tle, one bat­tery fired at a tar­get that did not exist. The records state that on the third day of the war a mis­sile bat­tery “auto engaged a spu­ri­ous track. Missile fired before they could over­ride. Space com­mand con­firmed spu­ri­ous…“
Victoria Samson, a spokes­woman for the Center For Defense Information, an inde­pen­dent defense depart­ment watch­dog group, said the Army is try­ing to blame the friendly fire inci­dents on any­thing but the Patriot mis­sile defense sys­tem.
“The tech­nol­ogy seems to be sacro­sanct. The peo­ple not so much,” she said. 

July 7th, 2004 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.