PAC-3 Israel continues to score with million-dollar missiles

The Israeli military said the Syrian drone was shot down in the demilitarized zone by a Patriot PAC-3 defense system. On Twitter, Israel said it would "continue to conduct military operations against attempts to violate the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement, resolutely preventing threats to Israeli sovereignty or civilian lives."

Exactly two days earlier, Israel's Patriot missile defense system detected, tracked, and shot down a Syrian military UAV over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

After the incident, the Israeli air force launched missiles to destroy three Syrian army positions in the southern al-Quneitra region. The fact that Israel's PAC-3 system has continuously achieved successes in recent days has partly dispelled doubts about the uselessness of PAC-3 in the mission of preventing UAV-type flying vehicles.

Because in the past, Patriot was criticized by many US allies such as Türkiye as "useless" and they did not want to buy it because it was not capable of protecting them against enemy missiles.

In particular, on March 24, 2015, the Syrian army fired a missile across the Turkish border near the town of Reyhanli, southern Hatay province, creating a 15m wide crater, collapsing the roof of a building at a nearby military post, damaging two military vehicles and slightly injuring five civilians.

The failure of the Patriot (deployed by the US and Germany to protect Türkiye) was later blamed on misplacement, but some still doubt whether, even if placed in the right location, the Patriot could have intercepted the Scud missile.

Then on July 17, 2016, the Israeli army used 2 Patriot missiles and 1 air-to-air missile from an F-16I aircraft but still could not shoot down a drone from Syria that was flying to scout the Golan Heights area, allowing the UAV to fly back to Syria.

Later, the Times of Israel reported that two Patriot missiles failed to shoot down a Hezbollah UAV that was flying over to monitor and take photos of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) exercise, and its debris even injured a 14-year-old girl in the Golan Heights.

Furthermore, the Patriot missile was also criticized as useless in the war with Iraq. During the first Gulf War (1991), Iraq fired 40 missiles at Israeli territory and 46 at Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, these rockets only fell on sparsely populated areas in Israel, so human damage was insignificant, with only 2 people dead and 11 injured.

But a Scud missile crashed into a US military barracks in the Saudi city of Dhahran, killing at least 26 US soldiers and wounding 100 others, causing the largest loss of coalition forces in a single day during Operation Desert Storm.

Meanwhile, despite being widely deployed, the US Patriot surface-to-air missile only successfully intercepted 20% of the Scud missiles. In particular, the most forgettable incident for the US was when 26 Patriot missiles failed to intercept one R-17 (Scud-B) missile, while they were 3 times more expensive than their opponents.

Since then, this incident has been repeatedly mentioned as a shameful achievement of the famous Patriot-3 (PAC-3) missile defense system that the US has sold to many countries and also deployed to many areas to protect its troops and allies.