Shocking secret: Is the US Patriot complex just paper?

Independent analysts from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies have conducted a study on the performance of the US Patriot missile defense system in Saudi Arabia and concluded that the famous US missile defense system is actually not working.

Shocking secret: Is the US Patriot complex just paper?

Analysts have been studying Houthi missile attacks on the country since November 2017.

Although officials claimed the system successfully intercepted the attacks, the Yemeni missiles were not actually shot down. The conclusions of Jeffrey Lewis and colleagues were published on the Foreign Policy website.

The experts conducted the study in the following order: First, they mapped the area and marked where the debris fell, including the missile casing, the warhead, and the interceptor missile positions.

The results were successful. These missiles fell on Riyadh, while their warheads separated, flew through the defense system and finally fell not far from the target.

Specifically, in the missile attacks on Saudi Arabia that took place in November 2017 and December 2017, one of the warheads fell a few hundred meters from the fifth terminal of Khalid International Airport.

In addition, the authors recall a recent incident when a Patriot missile, instead of intercepting Houthi missiles, exploded in a residential area in Riyadh.

Specifically, a video posted on social media shows a Patriot missile turning around and crashing to the ground, while another exploded immediately after leaving the launch pad.

"The analysis shows that Saudi Arabia appears to have intercepted no missiles from Yemen, not even a single one. This result is completely contrary to the previous statements of the country's authorities and leads experts to hypothesize: Could it be that the US Patriot missile defense system is not working?", the experts wrote.

This result further casts doubt on the US claims regarding this defense complex. They doubt the complex's ability to intercept long-range ballistic missiles.

In particular, based on research by independent experts, in the war in the Persian Gulf, the Patriot complex only intercepted one Scud missile out of 47 launched (while the United States claimed to have intercepted 50% of this total).

This information will certainly make some countries that have been planning to deploy this complex reconsider. Previously, this complex received special attention from European countries to counter the threat from Russia. Is this complex really effective and can it protect European countries from attacks from Russia's Iskander complex?

Patriot PAC-2 is a long-range air defense missile system designed to destroy enemy ballistic missiles at ranges of up to 160 km.

PAC-2 was developed in the late 1980s, when the PAC-1 system proved vulnerable to ballistic missile threats.

Nguyen Dong