Nikki Grace

They had a busy night in Kiev last night, appearing to have fired off 30 of the top US air defense missiles—the Patriot. Each Patriot missile goes for something like $5.25 million apiece, for a total—in less than two minutes—of around $160 million up in smoke, so to speak. But here’s the thing about the Patriot system—nobody really knows how effective they are, or even IF they can be considered effective (a bit like, we still don’t really know what happened to those four Russian aircraft last week). I found an article that explains the uncertainties, but one thing to keep in mind—Patriots, like all anti-missile surface to air missile (SAM) systems, are not 100% effective (probably not close to that) and so volleys of SAMs are launched against each incoming missile. It’s NOT a one on one thing, and especially so because the Russians make extensive use of decoys to protect the actual strike missiles. So, you can count on it that when 30 Patriots are fired off they are responding to only a few, at most, incoming missiles and must make it through a screen of accompanying decoys.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:47 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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