The Dallas Morning News February 26, 2003
Retooled Patriot may get a new shot;
Despite limited success in '91, missile defense in demand around gulf
By Richard Whittle
WASHINGTON - With conflict on the horizon, Iraq's neighbors are clamoring for a U.S. weapon that got star billing during the 1991 Persian Gulf War but later was judged a bit player.
Bolstered by television pictures of bright explosions in the skies over Israel and Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials touted the Patriot air defense missile as a huge success in knocking out Iraqi Scud ballistic missiles during the Gulf War.
But the loss of 28 Americans in one Scud strike on a U.S. Army barracks in Saudi Arabia late in the campaign, plus painstaking postwar analysis, subsequently made clear that the Patriot was a far more porous shield than it appeared.
"The television pictures were somewhat misleading," said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank. "The general view today is that it may not have actually destroyed anything."
Patriot-maker Raytheon Co. of Lexington, Mass., insists its missiles - originally designed to shoot down airplanes - were "very impressive" against Iraqi Scuds. "Patriot success was over 70 percent in Saudi Arabia and over 40 percent in Israel," a company brochure declares, citing official Army figures.
But Philip Coyle, who headed all Pentagon weapons testing from 1994 to 2001, said, "I've never seen an analysis that would suggest that it did that well."
In any event, the Patriot clearly remains the defensive weapon of choice for nations with reason to fear attack by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Experts say the explanation for the Patriot's renewed popularity is simple: Imperfect though it is, the system works better than any other weapon available against ballistic missiles. And since the Gulf War, the Pentagon has invested $ 3 billion beefing it up.
Highly sought
Patriot batteries are one of the items Iraqi neighbor Turkey wanted from NATO in a request that Belgium, France and Germany originally blocked, creating a crisis in the alliance. A NATO committee that excludes France later agreed to supply the equipment.
Israel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - all targeted by Iraq in the Gulf War - have had Patriot batteries for more than a decade.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, though vehemently resisting a war on Iraq, has said his country would send Israel more Patriots. And the Army last month sent extra Patriot batteries to Kuwait from El Paso's Fort Bliss to help protect 50,000 or more U.S. troops now deployed there.
Officials in Bahrain, headquarters of the U.S. 5th Fleet, announced in January that they also would deploy Patriots, though they failed to say whether they would buy or borrow them. Army officials won't discuss missile deployments, but U.S. officials say no Patriot sales are under way.
Four days after Bahrain's announcement, Jordanian officials said the United States would provide them three Patriot batteries.
Patriots also have been reported in Qatar, where Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. Central Command, is to make his headquarters if President Bush orders an attack on Iraq.
"United States troops, coalition troops, are going to end up in a lot of interesting places, and every country they go to, Patriot will go with them," predicted Tim Carey, vice president of the Raytheon unit that makes the system.
A Patriot battery is a complex collection of equipment: a control station on a heavy truck; a battery maintenance center on another truck; three trucks to haul trailers that hold antennas, the radar and an electric power plant; two big trailers loaded with repair parts; eight mobile missile launchers.
Raytheon has greatly improved the system since the Gulf War by substituting wireless communications for cables that used to connect the Patriot's control center to its launchers, Mr. Carey said. That has expanded the area a battery can defend sevenfold, he said.
The company also has improved the system's target detection radar and the radar homing device or "seeker" on the missile it makes, now known as the "PAC-2 GEM+," for Patriot Advanced Capability 2 Guidance Enhanced Missile Plus.
The new seeker makes the PAC-2, originally an anti-aircraft missile, more effective against ballistic missiles like the Scud, said Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
In 1994, the Army also gave Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control of Grand Prairie a contract to develop another improved Patriot missile, the PAC-3, which is smaller and slams into its target to kill it.
The old PAC-2 and the GEM+ carry a warhead that explodes near the target, flinging shrapnel at the enemy missile or aircraft. vThe PAC-2's exploding warhead and the tendency of aging Iraqi Scuds to break apart in flight help explain the false impressions of success the Patriot made in 1991, said Mr. Thompson, the analyst.
When a PAC-2 explodes high in the sky, he said, "it's easy to think that you're looking at an intercept. But in point of fact, a lot of the time it was either the missile's warhead blowing up too far away to do any damage or it was debris from the Scud spontaneously blowing up."
Last-second turns
Engineered in Grand Prairie but built in Lufkin and Camden, Ark., Lockheed's PAC-3 has "a very accurate seeker on the front of the missile and a very agile airframe to allow it to maneuver in that last few critical seconds before it impacts the target," company spokesman Craig Vanbebber said.
The missile holds 188 small rocket motors that adjust its course in the moments before impact to hit the enemy missile at the "optimal aim point" to destroy it, he added.
Moreover, he said, because the PAC-3 is much smaller than the PAC-2, each Patriot launcher can fire 16 of the Lockheed missiles, compared with four PAC-2s. The PAC-3 is 9.8 inches in diameter, while the PAC-2's girth is 16 inches, and at 708 pounds, the PAC-3 weighs about 1,300 pounds less than the PAC-2.
Both Lockheed's PAC-3 and Raytheon's GEM+ are still being developed and are available only to the U.S. Army.
Since 1999, Lockheed has delivered more than 160 PAC-3s, and in January it got a new $ 341 million contract to build 88 more missiles and other components. Each PAC-3 costs roughly $ 2.5 million, though that price may come down as more are built, according to Pentagon officials.
In all, the Pentagon plans to buy 100 PAC-3s this year and 108 in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The Army has ordered 148 GEM+ upgrades to existing PAC-2 missiles, and Raytheon delivered a small number in November, company spokesman Dave Shea said.
Pentagon and Lockheed officials say the PAC-3's "hit-to-kill" technology will make it more effective against any missiles Iraq fires - especially those carrying chemical or biological warheads, which Mr. Hussein didn't use in 1991.
"When you're talking about tactical ballistic missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction, the need to put more energy on the warhead became evident during the Gulf War," said Lockheed's Mr. Vanbebber.
"The PAC-3 literally hits the incoming target body-to-body and drives the PAC-3 missile through the target," he explained. "Not only do we strike it, we pick exactly where we want to strike it."
What's expected
The hope is that the Patriot's newly extended range and the PAC-3's ability to target specific spots on enemy missiles will make it possible to knock them out much sooner after they launch and dissipate chemical or biological agents before they reach their targets.
How many missiles Iraq has left is unclear, and U.S. forces are expected to target those that can be located and destroy them by bombing or commando raids early in a war. But some Iraqi missile firings have to be reckoned with, and former Pentagon testing chief Mr. Coyle warns that the Patriot, like any other kind of air defense, is a leaky umbrella.
"It's fairly typical that air defense systems in general will only be 25 or, say, 30 percent" successful, Mr. Coyle said.
The Missile Defense Agency reports that the PAC-3 successfully intercepted its ballistic missile target in seven out of 10 flight tests conducted since 1999.
Mr. Coyle says some of those tests weren't realistic, since the testers knew where the target missiles were coming from and when they would be fired. And none of the tests was conducted against a Scud, whose erratic flight patterns make it a difficult target, he notes.
The true test will come in battle, of course, and Mr. Coyle says even the 25 to 30 percent success rate he expects would be "better than nothing" for those targeted by Iraqi missiles, particularly those with biological or chemical warheads.
"That 25 or 30 percent would, I suppose, still be acceptable," Mr. Coyle said. "But there would be people afterward who would say, 'Gee, I didn't think these things were going to get through.'"
E-mail rwhittle@dallasnews.com
GRAPHIC: CHART(S): The New Patriots (LAYNE SMITH/Staff Artist; SOURCES: Lockheed Martin; Raytheon; GlobalSecurity.org; Dallas Morning News research)
Copyright © 2003, The Dallas Morning News
