US air defense system sent to Ukraine is not your father’s anti-missile missile
Jamie McIntyre
Video Embed
There was a rush of excitement on the first Saturday in May when Ukraine reported that, for the first time, it was able to shoot down one of Russia’s advanced hypersonic missiles with the recently acquired, U.S.-made Patriot air defense system.
Ukraine’s air force commander said the Russian Kh-47 Kinzhal missile was launched from a MiG-31 fighter bomber over Russian airspace and intercepted with a Patriot missile before it reached its target in the capital Kyiv.
HOW THE TREASURY IS SCRAMBLING TO STOP DEFAULT — OR MITIGATE ITS FALLOUT
Russia claimed its first use of the hypersonic weapon in March, and at the time, the U.S. said Ukraine had no effective defense against the air-launched Kinzhal, which can fly at 10 times the speed of sound.
“Hypersonic missiles are generally very, very difficult to counter, and it wouldn’t surprise me that Ukrainian air defenses are limited in their ability to go after hypersonic missiles,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on CNN.
But after Ukrainian crews were trained in the U.S. and Germany, Patriot systems arrived last month, supplied by the U.S., Netherlands, and Germany.
On Twitter, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov was ebullient. He pronounced the Patriots “a new powerful tool of Ukrainian air defense” while mocking Vladimir Putin for boasting that “Russian weapons are the best in the world.”
A few days later, the Pentagon validated the kill shot.
“We can confirm that the Ukrainians took down this Russian missile with a Patriot missile defense system,” said Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.
“My first reaction was elation, ‘This is great,’ followed quickly by, ‘We’ve seen this movie before,’’’ said Joe Cirincione, a veteran arms control expert.
Cirincione had reason to be wary. He was the lead staffer for a House Government Operations Committee investigation into the inflated claims of the Patriot’s performance during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
After the war, the Army claimed a nearly 100% success rate, saying that of 42 Iraqi Scuds engaged by Patriots, 41 were destroyed, but the subsequent bipartisan investigation found Patriot missiles, at best, hit four Scuds but also may have missed every time.
That was 30 years ago, when the Patriot relied on 1980s technology, including a blast fragmentation warhead that was better suited to downing aircraft than missiles.
The most current model, known as the PAC-3, for “Patriot Advanced Capability,” employs a newer interceptor with a more effective “hit-to-kill” warhead, along with more advanced radars and updated command and control systems.
But two launchers given to Ukraine by the Netherlands are the older PAC-2 versions of the Patriot system that still use the less-lethal fragmentation warhead, and the Pentagon won’t say which version was credited with shooting down the Russian missile.
All of this is reason for caution, argued Cirincione.
“This is a much-improved Patriot from what we deployed in the Gulf War, or even in the 2003 Iraq War,” he told the Washington Examiner. “It should be able to do this, but this is a very hard mission, and we don’t want to overpromise. The worst thing is to have the public or troops believe they have more protection than we can actually offer.”
One problem uncovered by the 1992 investigation was that the system itself indicates whether the intercept resulted in a hit or a miss, based on radar tracking and computer algorithms.
“In the Gulf War, they would fire the missile. There would be an explosion in the sky. The Patriot would send a probable kill indicator because it [has] exploded at the point in space where [it] was designed to explode. There would be no reports of damage on the ground, and they would call it a hit,” Cirincione explained.
But the Scuds, which were highly inaccurate to begin with, were rarely, if ever, destroyed. They simply went down in remote parts of the desert or fell into the sea.
“We just need more data, including ground damage assessments,” Cirincione said. “We have to look for proof of intercept beyond the positive indicators the system generates and the explosion in the sky. We know that that’s not enough to prove an intercept.”
And then there’s the debate over whether the Russian Kinzhal missile, which is a modified short-range Iskander ground-launched ballistic missile, is a truly revolutionary weapon.
“There’s nothing special or particularly exciting about this system,” tweeted Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analysis. “Iskander-M is a long-standing system. Hundreds have been fired. Kinzhal is an air-launched variant of this system. It uses the aircraft for added range and initial velocity. Otherwise it seems unremarkable. It is ‘hypersonic’ in the same way as many other ballistic missiles.”
In 2018, when Putin first boasted that Russian engineers were developing a new generation of missiles “absolutely invulnerable to any air or missile defense system,” Putin was referring to an intercontinental ballistic missile dubbed “Avangard,” which he claimed would travel 20 times the speed of sound and launch a highly maneuverable hypersonic, potentially nuclear, warhead.
“That’s not what this is,” Cirincione said. “It is not a hypervelocity maneuvering cruise missile, which is considered an extremely difficult target to hit. It can make some minor twists and turns as it hones in on the target, but nothing like the kind of maneuverability that a true hypervelocity cruise missile would have. All ballistic missiles travel faster than Mach 5 as they close in on their target.”
Still, the Pentagon insists the Patriot is one of the world’s most advanced air defense systems with a proven capability against cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and aircraft.
At a May 23 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, testified the Patriot system has a “natural” capability against hypersonic weapons.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“It’s a cruise missile killer, and if you have a fast-maneuvering cruise missile, it can bite off part of that threat,” said Hill, who, under questioning, also revealed a single Patriot missile is a very expensive silver bullet, costing roughly $4 million a shot.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.