Army Review Finds Flaws in Patriot Missile Usage during Iraq Invasion

[thedrifter]

Posted on Sun, Nov. 23, 2003

Army Review Finds Flaws in Patriot Missile Usage during Iraq Invasion
By Ross Kerber, The Boston Globe Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Nov. 23 - Crews operating the Patriot antimissile system during the invasion of Iraq were ill trained, lacked communications equipment, and had trouble keeping track of battlefield allies, according to an Army review.

"Operators did not know what their system can and cannot do," says the document, which focuses on operational shortcomings rather than on hardware problems with the Patriot, which is built largely by defense contractor Raytheon Co. in Andover.

The review was issued at a delicate time for the system, which has received praise from the US military for shooting all of the nine Iraqi missiles it engaged during fighting in March and April, a better record than the Patriot posted during the Gulf War.

But many outside defense specialists said they cannot judge the Patriot's recent performance until officials offer more details about each engagement with a hostile missile and explain two friendly-fire cases that left three allied pilots dead. The report, titled "Initial Lessons Learned" and prepared by Army Air Defense Artillery officers at Fort Bliss, Texas, does not address those questions. It was first publicized last week by GlobalSecurity.org, an independent research group in Washington that noticed the report on a military website. A spokeswoman at Fort Bliss confirmed the report's authenticity but said officers were not available to comment.

The report describes a host of problems, many related to how Patriot sensors were connected to other military systems and sensors, key to providing a long-range picture of the battlefield. Integration "was done on the fly," says the report, a problem for crews accustomed to fixed-site operations.

More seriously, ground crews "did not understand how the values for the system initialization tabular entries were established," relying instead on instructions from above. These settings help Patriot units distinguish between friendly and enemy missiles and aircraft. And air-defense personnel lacked a system for keeping tabs on friendly units as well as long-range communications equipment.

Also, soldiers often noticed so many false radar signals "caused by Patriot" that they disconnected it from other data networks. "This issue is even more disturbing given the high probability that Patriot may be the only sensor to pick up" short-range ballistic missiles, the report says. It is not clear whether the problem was caused by Patriot hardware or by its interaction with the communications network.

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the report struck him as "dancing around the issues" because it did not discuss the friendly-fire deaths or provide an exact accounting of battlefield engagements.

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? 2003, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. RTN,

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Sempers,

Roger