Patriot Missiles Are Made in America and Fail Everywhere
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
PAC-3 is much more advanced and the kill vehicle much more accurate.
Seriously? The system can't intercept threads it wasn't designed to? That's the article?
Let me say that I'm a pacifist 100%; diplomacy comes first and all that but war is really where you can't lie and all your bad decisions are right there in your face and fuck you up completely if you didn't think hard enough through these things. This particular incident reminds me of when the Pakistanis procured the latest F-6 aircrafts from the US but were unable to use them effectively in a war against India (1971) because their pilots were not sufficiently trained in how to handle the advanced aircraft systems.... oops.
This is the critical part. The hardware may work as intended, but if no one can operate it what use is it? If it works as intended but is ineffective against the enemies weapons or techniques what use is it? Or if there isn't even an enemy to use these systems against? But to play ball with the US as an ally, nations can be placed in a position where they're making these purchases whether appropriate or not.
They likely were acquired before PAC-3 became available for international sales.
> Leads to a question: What's the point of continuing to deploy something that, by all (unclassified) accounts, seems to have no real utility?
PAC-2 have utility, they are designed to shutdown enemy aircraft on long distance. PAC-3 in contrast is designed specifically against ballistic missiles, like houthies use in their attacks.
It _may_ (at the time) have boosted the confidence of allied and US soldiers on the ground.
It _may_ have been deemed necessary to do _anything_ that made the US’es allies think the US didn’t let them handle the threat alone.
If you want to claim to be the policeman of the world, this won’t help your reputation:
USA : “If war comes, we will protect you”
Saoudis: “War came. Can you help us?”
USA : “Sorry, our rockets do not work”I think the point is that it is better than nothing and may well make a difference. It's not totally useless, like those fake bomb detectors which were being discussed a couple of years ago.
You can focus on the failures and call the system useless, or you can focus on the successes and be thankful that occasionally the system works. It's better than nothing, so might as well try.
Various versions of the system are being deployed as countermeasures for missile systems that Patriot is not designed to work against and so likely has a very low success rate. And, if your countermeasures end up turning around and hitting your own city all it does is make the enemy's attack even more effective:
One interceptor explodes catastrophically just after
launch, while another makes a U-turn in midair and then
comes screaming back at Riyadh, where it explodes on the
ground.
In fairness, the system deployed in Saudi Arabia — the
Patriot Advanced Capability-2 or PAC-2 — is not well
designed to intercept the Burkan-2 missiles that the
Houthis are firing at Riyadh. The Burkan-2 flies around
600 miles and appears to have a warhead that separates
from the missile itself. The [system's] prediction of where the Scud will next appear is a function of the Scud's known velocity and the time of the last radar detection.
Velocity is a real number that can be expressed as a whole number and a decimal (e.g., 3750.2563 . . . miles per hour).
Time is kept continuously by the system's internal clock in tenths of seconds but is expressed as an integer or whole number (e.g., 32, 33, 34 . . .).
The longer the system has been running, the larger the number representing time.
To predict where the Scud will next appear, both time and velocity must be expressed as real numbers.
Because of the way the Patriot computer performs its calculations and the fact that its registers are only 24 bits long, the conversion of time from an integer to a real number cannot be any more precise than 24 bits.
This conversion results in a loss of precision causing a less accurate time calculation.
The effect of this inaccuracy on the [system's] calculation is directly proportional to the target's velocity and the length that the system has been running.
Consequently, performing the conversion after the Patriot computer system has been running continuously for extended periods causes the [system's estimated Scud position] to shift away from the center of the target, making it less likely that the target will be successfully intercepted.
Incidentally, although this is often described as a "floating point bug", the actual arithmetic was 24-bit fixed point. In order to convert from tenths of seconds to seconds they multiplied by 1/10 = 0.00011001100110011001100. If they had used a floating point format with a 24-bit mantissa, they could have multiplied by 2^-3 * 0.110011001100110011001100, giving 4 more bits of precision, which would probably have been enough to intercept the missile! :)
Also perhaps interestingly, the problem only arose because a software upgrade had introduced a new function to do the conversion more accurately, but didn't call it everywhere. If they had used the old inaccurate conversion throughout, the errors would mostly have cancelled out.
See http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html
US missile defense was always a mess.
Problem: social media, and a very fragmented internet newsmedia sector, make this less effective than before. The Houthis no doubt are aware that the Saudis are not successful.
Patriot: killing allies in the skies and civilians on the ground since 1990.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/two-failures-in-one-day...
This quote is nowhere in the article, where did you got it?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-raytheon-poland-patriot/p...
"The total estimated program cost is $3.2 billion"
The reason for both of these deals seems to be somewhat correlated to Iskander units in Kaliningrad.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/poland-si...