Yo Bone head enough said
That incident and a few others like it led Ted Postol, an MIT weapons scientist, to testify before a congressional committee, "It is possible that if we had not attempted to defend against Scuds, the level of resulting damage would be no worse than actually occurred." Postol got into big trouble with the Raytheon Corp. and the Pentagon for making this statement. However, I
reported at the time for the
Boston Globe that, at a classified briefing shortly after Desert Storm at the Mitre Corp. in Bedford, Mass., three Raytheon engineers were asked by a roomful of weapons scientists whether the Patriot reduced the damage caused by Scuds. The engineers replied that they did not know. (My sources were two scientists at the meeting, neither of them Postol.)
All this said, it may well be that this time the PAC-3 did knock down four Iraqi missiles, as claimed. First, as is now well-known (and contrary to initial reports), the Iraqi missiles were not Scuds. They were other models of Soviet-built missiles that fly more slowly, at lower altitudes, and across a shorter range, than Scuds. Second, the new Patriot
works in a very different way than the old Patriots.
With the old Patriot, known as PAC-2, a radar scanned the sky for missiles or airplanes. (By the way, this earlier model was designed to shoot down planes, not missiles. There is no reason to doubt the report that a Patriot accidentally shot down a British fighter jet.) If an object appeared in the sky, it reflected the radar signal, which bounced back. A computer identified the object and tracked its flight path. After this information was processed, a Patriot missile was launched. The Patriot was tipped with a large fragmentary warhead. When it reached a certain distance from the target, the warhead exploded, blowing up the target (or such was the hope) in the process. The PAC-3 utilizes a more precise, longer-range radar and faster data-processing systems. And the missile doesn't carry a warhead; rather, it is designed to slam into the target (this is why it's called an HTK, or "hit-to-kill," weapon). There are two major advantages to HTK, in theory. First, if the Patriot is fired mistakenly or wildly misses, it won't explode when it falls back to earth. Second, there is less room for fudging the definition of "intercept"—the term means that the Patriot actually hit the target. (Whether the target is destroyed, however, remains an issue.)
However, the evidence is mixed on whether the PAC-3 can actually perform this complex task. In "development tests," which are designed to see if the technology works on the most basic level, the new Patriot did very well, hitting 10 out of 11 targets. However, in "operational tests," which are supposed to simulate real combat, the missile did much less well, slamming into the target in fewer than half the engagements, due mainly to computer glitches. (These figures come from a knowledgeable Pentagon official, but see also
this.)
Many times during Desert Storm, officials thought that a Scud was shot down by a Patriot, when in fact the Scud had simply broken up into small fragments or gone far astray. That may be what happened to some of the presumably downed missiles in this war, too. (All of them, like the Scuds, are Soviet-made missiles and are known to be neither very stable nor accurate.) Then again, maybe the new, improved Patriot hit them. If so, the hits would signify a dramatic technological advance. For now, though, I'm with the knowledgeable Pentagon official, who told me, "I'm going to wait till the facts are in."