The International Herald Tribune March 24, 2003
4 missile intercepts claimed for updated Patriot
By Nicholas Wade
An upgraded version of the Patriot missile has intercepted four Iraqi missiles fired at coalition forces in recent days, military spokesmen said.
If these interceptions are verified, they would apparently be the first undisputed success of a battlefield anti-missile system, but skeptics said it is too early to know how well the system worked.
In the Gulf War in 1991, an earlier version of the Patriot was used against the 93 Scud missiles fired by Iraq. U.S. Army spokesmen said the Patriot had a 79 percent success rate against Scuds fired at Saudi Arabia and a 40 percent rate against those launched at Israel. Critics doing their own analysis of interceptions from television broadcasts, however, put the Patriot's success rate at as low as zero.
The Patriot system may have succeeded this time around because it uses a new missile designed to overcome the shortcomings of the PAC-2, the missile used during the first Gulf War.
The PAC-2 was designed for use against aircraft and later modified to be fired against missiles. Its successor, the PAC-3, was specifically designed to shoot down other missiles. Built by Lockheed Martin, each PAC-3 costs $3 million, said a spokeswoman for the army's Aviation and Missile Command.
It was PAC-3s that reportedly intercepted the four Iraqi missiles, which were not Scuds but a shorter-range vehicle known as the Ababil-100.
George Lewis, a missile expert in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said the PAC-3 had performed quite well in its developmental tests, conducted by the contractor under ideal conditions, and somewhat less well in the more realistic operational tests, undertaken by soldiers using production-line missiles.
He dismissed as "absolute garbage" the army's claim for the PAC-2's effectiveness in the earlier Gulf War and said that the PAC-3 success, if verified, would probably be the first time a battlefield anti-missile system had worked.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a space and military research group, said that "everyone should reserve judgment" on the new Patriot's performance and that the reports of success, while in line with the missile's test results, were based on numbers too small to mean much.
The PAC-2 was designed to destroy its target by exploding next to it, a generally effective measure against aircraft. Its successor makes a direct collision with the missile it is intercepting, using its own momentum to obliterate it.
The PAC-3 is also much more agile and can pursue a missile that tries to outmaneuver the defense. This was a property that Iraq's Al Hussein Scuds possessed inadvertently. Made by attaching standard Scuds together to extend their range, Al Husseins tended to break apart and follow unpredictable paths, bewildering the PAC-2s trying to intercept them.
The PAC-3 has a collar of 180 small rocket motors that fire explosively in the last microseconds before impact, guiding the nose of the missile into direct collision with its target, a Lockheed Martin spokesman said.
The Patriot system consists of a radar, a launcher and other components. The system, and an upgraded version of the PAC-2 are still made by Raytheon. Four of the PAC-3s can fit in each launcher, quadrupling the system's firepower. Both types of missile can be used in the same launcher, allowing the operator to use the PAC-3 on missiles and the PAC-2 against aircraft. When the Patriot's phased-array radar picks up an incoming missile, it downloads the information to a PAC-3 just before it is fired. The missile has on-board radar to track the target after launch.
Copyright © 2003, The International Herald Tribune
