In Ukraine, A New Chance to Judge the Patriot Missile

The much-lauded air-defense system has a decidedly mixed record. The Pentagon should watch its performance carefully.

Ukraine is taking delivery of its first Patriot air-defense batteries, the weapon so highly and baselessly lauded during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, as upgraded Patriots take the battlefield once again, U.S. officials must judge how they fare—accurately, this time.

Video released by Ukrainian defense officials show Patriots provided by NATO countries deploying in Ukraine. DOD officials announced on May 3 that U.S.-supplied units have also arrived in country. “In high-intensity combat against the hardest targets, the Patriot can confirm or disprove its widely-regarded reputation as one of the world’s best air defense systems,” wrote Illia Ponomarenko for The Kyiv Independent on May 2.

The weapon has a checkered past. In 1991, U.S. officials and media excitedly reported a 100-percent success rate for the system, with claims that Patriots had intercepted Scud missiles launched from Iraq at Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the following year, Congressional hearings found that these claims were misleading and highly inaccurate. I was the lead staffer for the House Government Operations Committee investigation.

Rather than destroying 41 of 42 Scuds engaged, as President George H.W. Bush claimed at the end of the war, investigators from the Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office determined that Patriots only hit between zero and four of 44 Scuds engaged.

The incorrect claims of Patriot PAC-2’s success stem from misunderstanding of the way the interceptor works, how the system gauges its success, and its users’ failure to conduct ground damage assessments to determine whether the target was actually hit. 

The PAC-2 variant sprays fragments, like a shotgun blast, as it nears a target. Explosions seen in the sky in the 1991 war were not signs of a Patriot hitting an incoming Scud, but of proximity fuzes detonating as the Patriot neared a Scud or a Scud fragment, or by the missile automatically self-destructing after missing a Scud, or by Patriots flying after false targets. 

Nor can the system determine if a Patriot missile actually hits its intended target. It can only determine that it detonated near a point in space where it calculated the target should be, sending back a “probable kill” indicator. 

These indicators are inaccurate. In the Gulf War, many of the targets turned out to be debris from the poorly designed Scuds as they broke up in flight. At least 45 percent of the 158 Patriots launched in the war were launched against debris or false targets, the Army reported.

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To read the rest of the story, please go to the Defense One site. They kindly published the story on May 5. It is free.