US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo admitted that US-made Patriot missile defense systems
failed to repel the recent attack on the kingdom’s oil facilities.
The Department of State press service quoted Pompeo as saying upon his arrival to Jeddah,
"We’ve seen air defense systems all around the world have mixed success.
Some of the finest in the world don’t always pick things up.
We want to work to make sure that infrastructure and resources are put in place such that attacks
like this would be less successful than this one appears to have been.”
In this video Defense Updates why Patriot Missile System failed to protect Saudi Arabia
oil facility from attack?
Let’s get started.
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On September 14, facilities of Saudi Arabia's oil company Aramco located in the east of
the country came under attack.
As per reports, the raid began around 4 a.m and drones as well as cruise missiles were
used in the attack, there were 18 drones and 7 missiles.
The world’s biggest oil refinery near the city of Abqaiq and a refinery near Khurais,
where Saudi’s second-largest oil field is located were targeted.
Being facilities of very significant importance, they were protected by layered air defense
The outer layer was Patriot PAC-2 surface-to-air missile batteries that the U.S. sold to Saudi
Arabia to intercept aircraft and missiles.
The inner layer consisted of several short-range automatic gun systems that were designed for
last-ditch defense.
In this case, the Patriot air defense failed to detect the incoming threats or was too
late.
From amateur videos available online, it seems Patriot fired interceptor missiles randomly
which failed to bring down the intended targets.
The automatic gun systems were fired sporadically, but the threats were not taken down.
The attack disrupted shipments of 5.7 million barrels of oil daily which is around 50% of
Saudi Arabia’s output.
Tensions peaked when Donald Trump said the US was “locked and loaded” and to ready
respond to saying the US knew who was behind them, indicating Iran’s hand.
The Patriot Missile System is manufactured by Raytheon is an air defense system designed
to protect against different kinds of aerial threats.
It entered service in1981.
The Patriot system has four major operational functions: communications, command and control,
radar surveillance, and missile guidance.
The four functions are designed to work seamlessly to provide a coordinated, secure, integrated,
mobile air defense system.
Different variants of Patriot systems have been sold to many countries like the Netherlands,
Poland, Germany, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait to name a few.
The Patriot system is expected to remain in the service until at least 2040.
Saudi Arabia has the Patriot PAC-2 variant.
The eye of the Patriot air defense system is the radar is AN/MPQ-65 radar which is used
to detect and track targets.
The AN/MPQ-65 Radar is a passive electronically scanned array radar.
It is equipped with IFF (Identification friend or foe) and electronic counter-countermeasure
to resist jamming.
The radar has a range of around 100 miles or 160 km.
The PAC-2 missile is 5.8 meters (19 ft 0 in) long, weighs about 900 kilograms (2,000 lb),
and is propelled by a solid-fueled rocket motor.
It has a range 45 miles or 70 km and can reach a maximum altitude of 15 miles or 24 km.
On paper, the Patriot System available to Saudi Arabia should have been able to defend
against the attack but it was not to be and this is not the first time.
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing
28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14th Quartermaster Detachment.
A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused
by a software error in the system's handling of timestamps.
The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which
time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second.
Due to the missile's speed, this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.
The radar system had successfully detected the Scud and predicted where to look for it
next.
However, the timestamps of the two radar pulses being compared were converted to floating
point differently: one correctly, the other introducing an error proportionate to the
operation time so far (100 hours) caused by the truncation in a 24-bit fixed-point register.
As a result, the difference between the pulses was wrong, so the system looked in the wrong
part of the sky and found no target.
With no target, the initial detection was assumed to be a spurious track.
No interception was attempted, and the Scud impacted on a makeshift barracks in an Al
Khobar warehouse, killing 28 soldiers
These were the first Americans to be killed from the Scuds that Iraq had launched against
Saudi Arabia and Israel.
On June 6, 2015, a Patriot battery was used to shoot down a Scud missile, fired at Saudi
Arabia by Houthi rebels in response to the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen.
Another Scud was fired at an electricity station in Jizan province and intercepted by a Saudi
Patriot on August 26, 2015.
Saudi Arabia claims that another long-range ballistic missile was fired toward Mecca and
intercepted by a Saudi Patriot on October 28, 2016.
However; Houthi sources say that the missile's intended target was the air force base in
King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, 65 km (40 miles) north-west of Mecca.
On March 20, 2017, a Qasef-1 drone was used by Houthi forces to strike Saudi Patriot systems
deployed against Yemeni missiles.
On March 25, 2018, a missile apparently fired from Yemen was intercepted by a Patriot missile
over Riyadh.
So, it can be said that the Patriot System deployed in Saudi Arabia has seen a fair share
of hits and misses.
The reason for the failure can be understood from the comments made by John Rood, under
secretary of defense for policy.
He said, “We’re seeing asymmetric investments in
things like swarming UAS technology, like unmanned aerial systems that really fly more
like the cruise missiles.
It’s a serious problem.”
Rood didn’t specifically mention the Saudi attacks, but indications were clear.
Speaking at a Center for European Policy Analysis event in Washington, he said the threats from
such weapons and tactics have developed faster than NATO’s ability to rework missile defense
and radar systems to detect smaller, faster-moving objects.
He added further, “As part of our investment priorities we have to shift as an alliance
where we’re putting our level of effort if you will, to put a little more emphasis
in that area.”
Seth Jones, a counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
stated, “almost no state” could have fully thwarted such an unconventional attack.
He added, “The vulnerability of Saudi Arabia’s ... critical
infrastructure is probably impossible to entirely defend,” Jones said, though the Saudis are
“fairly well prepared” to defend against conventional threats such as warplanes.
Air defense, especially against small, fast and maneuvering threats, is complex to pull
off and even a small niggle in the sequence will result in certain failure.
No air defense is full proof and the probability of success reduces as the area to defend increases.
It remains to be seen how America responds to growing asymmetric threats like these in the future.