Patriot Game - Yet Another Game Changer for Ukraine.

What Will It Really Change?

As Russian missiles and drones rain down on Ukraine, western media is once again touting the imminent appearance of another “game changer” that will turn the tide of battle, or at least stop those missiles in their tracks. The Patriot missile is dutifully deemed the “most advanced ground-based air defense system” in the U.S. arsenal and “highly effective” in media reports, which, if true, would be just as well, since it appears that at present the U.S. is prepared to send just one battery (cost:$1 billion, from Raytheon, of course.) Standard operating procedure calls for “ripple” launches of two missiles for every target, so the Ukrainians would quite certainly run through their (and by extension our own ) ammunition stockpile very fast, not to mention the spare parts that would have to be drawn from U.S. Army unit stocks.

Training a launch crewman to operate this highly complex and delicate system takes at least three months. Training a repair crewman takes a year. Media reports claim the crews will be Ukrainian, trained perhaps in Germany by American or German service personnel - unless of course the latter are surreptitiously deployed inside Ukraine, a further escalation in the deepening NATO war with Russia.

Even with fully trained crews and adequate stocks of ammunition, the Ukrainians are likely to be disappointed with the results (unless further involvement of NATO is an end in itself.) The Patriot’s combat record is dismal. First deployed to great acclaim in the 1991 Gulf War in defense of Riyadh and Tel Aviv against Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles, it succeeded in intercepting exactly one Saudi-bound Scud. Patriots did inflict more damage in Tel Aviv, but only on Israel. Failing to hit any Scuds, the Patriots slammed into the city they were supposedly defending.

Billions have been expended on improving the system in the ensuing thirty years, but it is unclear that things have improved much. Certainly, the Saudis, who have been induced to buy the system, have been sorely disappointed in its lack of success against Houthi missiles (which are essentially our old friend the Scud.) The system is described as “highly mobile” which the Ukrainians must hope is true, especially in light of a chance discovery by an Israeli researcher that the Patriot’s phased array radars can show up nicely on synthetic aperture radar imagery from the European Space Agency’s open-access SENTINEL-1 satellite, dedicated to monitoring ground conditions, such as soil moisture for economic research. The Russians have presumably made the same discovery, and will target their missiles appropriately, if and when the Patriots show up.