During that conflict, a great deal of notoriety descended on the U.S. Patriot missile system. Initially, that notoriety was positive in tone, and the system was hailed as "the defender of U.S. troops in the Gulf." Later, however, that image changed.
The Patriot missile had originally been designed in the 1970s strictly as an antiaircraft weapon. In the 1980s it was modified to also provide limited defense against short-range ballistic missiles, such as the Scud. It was not actually tested in combat until the first Gulf War in 1991.
A Patriot missile is 7.4 feet long and propelled by a single-stage solid fuel motor that accelerates it to speeds of around Mach 3 and out to a range of forty-three miles. The missile itself weighs 2,200 pounds, which includes a two-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead triggered by a proximity fuse. When the warhead detonates, shrapnel tears through the target like a blast from a shotgun, shredding guidance and other delicate systems. Guidance was carried out entirely from the ground, through a system called TVM, or Track Via Missile. Radar and high-speed computers tracked the missile and redirected it in flight to intercept the target.
Initially, the U.S. Army claimed a success rate against Saddam's missiles of eighty percent over Saudi Arabia and fifty percent over Israel. Later, however, as data from the conflict was reviewed, those claims were scaled back to seventy and forty percent.
In fact, the system probably didn't even perform that well.
Much of the problem was due to the fact that Iraq's redesign of the original Russian Scud design, which had increased the weapon's speed, had also weakened its structure. Al-Hussein missiles tended to break up as they reentered the atmosphere in the descent phase of their trajectory, which provided Patriot tracking radars with not a single target, but many, tumbling out of control. In some cases the detonation of Patriot warheads had helped break up the Iraqi missiles and push the fragments off-course.
Scuds, however, were already extremely limited in terms of their precise targeting ability. Guided by a primitive gyroscopic navigation system, they had a CEP of three kilometers. The CEP defined the radius of the area within which an incoming missile had a fifty-percent chance of striking. This made them effective as terror weapons aimed at cities, but virtually useless against small targets such as airfields or ships. Being blown off-course by a Patriot missile had little effect on whether they hit a specific target, since their fall was almost totally random in the first place. Some critics claimed that the Patriot defenses actually made the damage inflicted against Israel worse.
By the beginning of the new millennium, however, things were changing rapidly in the field. Iran's missile program, aided by technology provided by China, North Korea, and Russia, had reduced the CEP of the Shahab series of ballistic missiles to something less than one kilometer. This was still too large an area to allow pinpoint targeting of something like an individual ship, but it did encourage Iran's military planners to think in terms of a barrage of such missiles, all falling within a single, small area. One missile had a fifty-fifty chance of hitting a target a mile across. With ten missiles falling in that area, or twenty, or a hundred, the odds were that something important was going to be hit.
But Patriot technology had improved in the past decade as well. Stung by criticism of the Patriot's performance in 1991, the Army and its two Patriot subcontractors, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, began working to improve the system's accuracy and its reliability.
The PAC-2, the acronym standing for Patriot Advanced Capability, was a far more accurate missile, with a flight speed of Mach 5 and much greater range.
By 2001, however, PAC-3 was beginning to come online. PAC-3 was a much smaller missile — a canister containing four could be loaded into the launch tube of a single PAC-2—weighing about seven hundred pounds. It had a velocity of Mach 5, and a special attitude-control maneuvering system allowing in-flight guidance, coupled with an on-board inertial/active millimeter-wave radar for its terminal homing phase. Unlike earlier Patriots, the PAC-3 was designed with hit-to-kill capability, though it also possessed proximity fusing in case it missed. The warhead consisted of 160 pounds of high explosives as a "lethality enhancer," but the kinetic energy of a missile hitting the target directly at Mach 5 would, it was hoped, detonate the incoming missile or, at the least, so completely fragment it that its warhead would be neutralized.
As five Iranian missiles descended on the northern end of the island of Bahrain, PAC-3 batteries surrounding the grounds of the U.S. CENTCOM headquarters at Juffair, five miles southeast of the Bahrain capital of Manama, came to life, the launch tubes swiveling automatically to face the incoming threat.
A dozen missiles streaked into the sky.
"Control Room, Comm."
"Control Room," Stewart said, pulling his face back from the periscope eyepiece. "Go ahead."
"Sir, we're not picking up Commander Hawking's beacon. There's nothing on the emergency frequencies."
Damn…
"But a priority flash is coming in by satellite. Urgent, and it's flagged 'new orders.' There's a live visual component, sir."
"Patch it through."
"Aye aye, sir."
The main bridge television monitor was showing the view through Ohio's periscope, but it changed now to show the craggy face of Captain Thomas Garrett.
"Good evening, Captain," Garrett said. "Or… I guess for you, it's good morning."
"Good morning, sir."
"We've been receiving your intel packages. Good work… and congratulations on a mission well done."
"Thank you, sir." But Stewart knew that Garrett wouldn't be using satellite communications for a realtime conversation just to congratulate him.
"Captain, you are being assigned an urgent new mission, one of the absolute highest priority. Several minutes ago one of our satellites and an AWACS over the Gulf detected a mass launch of ballistic missiles from southern Iran. Those missiles are falling on Fifth Fleet headquarters as we speak."
"Jesus… "
"Our Patriot batteries are engaging them. We don't yet know how that will go.
"Your orders are to launch an immediate retaliation against Iran. Your principle targets will be identified missile batteries and mobile launchers… including, I might add, the mobile launchers some of your SEALs observed last night.
"Your targets also include Iranian radar and air defense assets along the coast, their port facilities in Bandar Abbas, several other military targets in the Bandar
Abbas region, and certain other targets of strategic importance.
"However, your primary target, with absolute top priority, is the facility code-named White Scimitar, near Bandar-e Charak, which your SEALs also investigated last night.
"We've been going over all of the data, from satellites and from your SEAL reconnaissance. We are uploading GPS coordinates and targeting data to your weapons system computer now, along with all necessary launch codes and authorizations. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"We will be putting together an appropriate military response using other assets in the region, but for now, you, Captain, are the sharp end of the sword. Our antimissile capabilities are limited simply in the number of PAC-3 assets we've been able to deploy to Bahrain. The more Iranian missile launchers you can knock out in the next few minutes, the more of our forces will survive in order to retaliate."