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The MIM-104 Patriot Missiile Interceptor Missile System -- Popularly Known As The Patriot Missile At The Time Of The First Gulf War -- Was It Indeed A Wonderweapon Or Was It Lauded Success Just Hype? Venerable Investigative Reporter Bill Kurtis Hosts And Narrates This Hard Look At The Battle Record Of The First Anti-Ballistic Missile System Ever Deployed In Battle, Presented In The Highest DVD Quality MPG Video Format Of 9.1 MBPS As An MP4 Video Download Or Archival Quality All Regions Format DVD! (Color, 1992, 48 Minutes.)
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The MIM-104 Patriot is a mobile interceptor missile surface-to-air missile (SAM) system, the primary such system used by the United States Army and several allied states. It is manufactured by the U.S. defense contractor Raytheon and derives its name from the radar component of the weapon system. The AN/MPQ-53 at the heart of the system is known as the "Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target", which is a backronym for "Patriot". In 1984, the Patriot system began to replace the Nike Hercules system as the U.S. Army's primary high to medium air defense (HIMAD) system and the MIM-23 Hawk system as the U.S. Army's medium tactical air defense system. In addition to defending against aircraft, Patriot is the U.S. Army's primary terminal-phase anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system. As of 2016, the system is expected to stay fielded until at least 2040. Patriot uses an advanced aerial interceptor missile and high-performance radar systems. Patriot was developed at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, which had previously developed the Safeguard ABM system and its component Spartan and hypersonic Sprint missiles. The symbol for Patriot is a drawing of a Revolutionary War-era minuteman. The MIM-104 Patriot has been widely exported. Patriot was one of the first tactical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to employ lethal autonomy in combat. The system was successfully used against Iraqi missiles in the 2003 Iraq War, and has also been used by Saudi and Emirati forces in the Yemen conflict against Houthi missile attacks. The Patriot system achieved its first undisputed shootdowns of enemy aircraft in the service of the Israeli Air Defense Command. Israeli MIM-104D batteries shot down two Hamas UAVs during Operation Protective Edge in August 2014, and in September 2014, an Israeli Patriot battery shot down a Syrian Air Force Sukhoi Su-24 which had penetrated the airspace of the Golan Heights, achieving the system's first known shootdown of a crewed enemy aircraft.
MIM-104 Patriot: The Gulf War: Prior to the First Gulf War, ballistic missile defense was an unproven concept in war. During Operation Desert Storm, in addition to its anti-aircraft mission, the Patriot was assigned to shoot down incoming Iraqi Scud or Al Hussein short range ballistic missiles launched at Israel and Saudi Arabia. The first combat use of Patriot occurred January 18, 1991, when it engaged what was later found to be a computer glitch. There were actually no Scuds fired at Saudi Arabia on January 18. This incident was widely misreported as the first successful interception of an enemy ballistic missile in history. Throughout the war, Patriot missiles attempted engagement of over 40 hostile ballistic missiles. The success of these engagements, and in particular how many of them were real targets, is still controversial. Postwar video analysis of presumed interceptions by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Theodore Postol suggests that no Scud was actually hit. This analysis is contested by Peter D. Zimmerman, who claimed that photographs of the fuselage of downed Scud missiles in Saudi Arabia demonstrated that the Scud missiles were fired into Saudi Arabia and were riddled with fragments from the lethality enhancer of Patriot Missiles. On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Al Hussein Scud missile hit the barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14th Quartermaster Detachment. A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters. The radar system had successfully detected the Scud and predicted where to look for it next. However, the timestamps of the two radar pulses being compared were converted to floating point differently: one correctly, the other introducing an error proportionate to the operation time so far (100 hours) caused by the truncation in a 24-bit fixed-point register. As a result, the difference between the pulses was wrong, so the system looked in the wrong part of the sky and found no target. With no target, the initial detection was assumed to be a spurious track and the missile was removed from the system. No interception was attempted, and the Scud impacted on a makeshift barracks in an Al Khobar warehouse, killing 28 soldiers, the first Americans to be killed from the Scuds that Iraq had launched against Saudi Arabia and Israel. Two weeks earlier, on February 11, 1991, the Israelis had identified the problem and informed the U.S. Army and the PATRIOT Project Office, the software manufacturer. As a stopgap measure, the Israelis had recommended rebooting the system's computers regularly. The manufacturer supplied updated software to the Army on February 26. There had previously been failures in the MIM-104 system at the Joint Defense Facility Nurrungar in Australia, which was charged with processing signals from satellite-based early launch detection systems. On February 15, 1991, President George H. W. Bush traveled to Raytheon's Patriot manufacturing plant in Andover, Massachusetts, during the Gulf War. He declared, the "Patriot is 41 for 42: 42 Scuds engaged, 41 intercepted!" The President's claimed success rate was over 97% at that point in the war. On April 7, 1992, Theodore Postol of MIT, and Reuven Pedatzur of Tel Aviv University testified before a House Committee claiming that, according to their independent analysis of video tapes, the Patriot system had a success rate of below 10%, and perhaps even a zero success rate. On April 7, 1992, Charles A. Zraket of Harvard Kennedy School and Peter Zimmerman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank funded by the United States government and Raytheon, testified about the calculation of success rates and accuracy in Israel and Saudi Arabia and discounted many of the statements and methodologies in Postol's report. According to Zimmerman, it is important to note the difference in terms when analyzing the performance of the system during the war: "In accordance with the standard firing doctrine, on average four Patriots were launched at each incoming Scud - in Saudi Arabia an average of three Patriots were fired. The large number of missiles fired suggests low confidence in individual missiles and that a higher rate of successful interceptions was achieved through brute force. For example, if a Patriot has a 50% individual success rate, two missiles will intercept 75% of the time, and three will intercept 87.5% of the time. Only one has to hit for a successful interception, but this does not mean that the other missiles would not also have hit." The Iraqi redesign of the Scuds also played a role. Iraq had redesigned its Scuds by removing weight from the warhead to increase speed and range, but the changes weakened the missile and made it unstable during flight, creating a tendency for the Scud to break up during its descent from near space. This presented a larger number of targets as it was unclear which piece contained the warhead. According to the Zraket testimony, there was a lack of high quality photographic equipment necessary to record the interceptions of targets. Therefore, Patriot crews recorded each launch on standard-definition videotape, which was insufficient for detailed analysis. Damage assessment teams videotaped the Scud debris that was found on the ground. Crater analysis was then used to determine if the warhead was destroyed before the debris crashed or not. Part of the reason for the 30% improvement in success rate in Saudi Arabia compared to Israel is that the Patriot merely had to push the incoming Scud missiles away from military targets in the desert or disable the Scud's warhead in order to avoid casualties, while in Israel the Scuds were aimed directly at cities and civilian populations. The Saudi Government also censored any reporting of Scud damage by the Saudi press. The Israeli Government did not institute the same type of censorship. Patriot's success rate in Israel was examined by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who did not have a political reason to play up Patriot's success rate. The IDF counted any Scud that exploded on the ground, regardless of whether or not it was diverted, as a failure for the Patriot. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army, which had many reasons to support a high success rate for Patriot, examined the performance of Patriot in Saudi Arabia. Both testimonies state that part of the problems stem from its original design as an anti-aircraft system. Patriot was designed with proximity fused warheads, which are designed to explode immediately prior to hitting a target spraying shrapnel out in a fan in front of the missile, either destroying or disabling the target. These missiles were fired at the target's center of mass. With aircraft this was fine, but considering the much higher speeds of tactical ballistic missiles, as well as the location of the warhead, usually in the nose, Patriot most often hit closer to the tail of the Scud due to the delay present in the proximity fused warhead, thus not destroying the missile's warhead and allowing it to fall to earth. In response to the testimonies and other evidence, the staff of the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Legislation and National Security reported, "The Patriot missile system was not the spectacular success in the Persian Gulf War that the American public was led to believe. There is little evidence to prove that the Patriot hit more than a few Scud missiles launched by Iraq during the Gulf War, and there are some doubts about even these engagements. The public and the United States Congress were misled by definitive statements of success issued by administration and Raytheon representatives during and after the war."