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While defending the performance of the Patriot missile last week, US
army officers reduced their estimates of how many Iraqi missiles the Patriot
hit during the Gulf War. The army now believes that the Patriot successfully
intercepted 24 missiles out of about 85 attempts. But it has ‘high confidence’
in only 10 attempts.

Even as the Pentagon renewed its defence of the Patriot’s record, new
evidence cast additional doubt on its credibility. The congressional General
Accounting Office revealed that the army’s earlier estimates of the Patriot’s
success were wildly optimistic and were based on over-hopeful assumptions.
For instance, if the army could not find an impact crater from a Scud
warhead, it assumed that the Scud had been destroyed by a Patriot. Yet some
army units on the scene never bothered to look for craters, says the GAO.

The Congressional Research Service, in a separate analysis of classified
Pentagon data, concluded that most of the army’s evidence was weak. Steven
Hildreth ofthe CRS says that he is only convinced that one Patriot missile
actually destroyed a Scud warhead.

During the Gulf War, President Bush announced to cheering crowds that
the Patriot had ‘intercepted’ 41 of the 42 Scuds that it was fired at. General
Robert Drolet defended Bush’s statement at last week’s congressional hearing,
saying that ‘intercepted’ meant only that ‘a Patriot and a Scud passed each
other in the sky’.

The army has abandoned an investigation of Ted Postol, the professor
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been among the Patriot’s
strongest critics (This Week, 28 March). Postol had been accused of using
classified data in an article he published that was critical of the missile’s
performance.