Over the past few weeks I’ve read many articles reporting on Turkey’s request for Patriot missile batteries. I don’t think I’ve understood anything about this request or the responses of many of the nations in the region to the request.
First, Turkey requested the Patriot missile batteries apparently in response to the spillover of bullets, mortar shells, and the concussive force of air-to-ground missiles from the Syrian Civil War. Why Patriot missiles for any of these issues? It seems like some other information must have been available at the time, because just the other day SCUD missiles landed near the border, but will Patriots knock all SCUD missiles out of the sky? All types?
My opinion is that the missile batteries do not tactically help Turkey against threats they face from Syria. This is why I do not understand the request nor the response, particularly by Russia and Iran. It’s one thing to specify escalation, but it’s another to demonstrate that escalation is a reasonable result from these actions.
Patriot missiles won’t help with shells or mortar rounds, but Syrian air force crossed into Turkish airspace a couple times. I don’t think it happened recently, though. Syria is using only choppers in the region bordering Turkey in order to avoid such incidents.
The missile issue is a big deal because it might be a first step toward the creation of a no-fly zone in Northern Syria (which is almost entirely in the hands of the rebels).
Regarding Russia, she makes very clear that she would be extremely pissed off if there was a direct intervention by NATO in Syria. It seems unthinkable that they would start a war over this, though, so I’m not sure what the threats would be exactly. Also, I’m not sure why Russia is still so involved in supporting the Syrian regime that seems quite doomed anyway at this point.
Syria has been launching SCUD missiles. Patriot missile systems are purported to be a defense against this. Some of the missiles have come down near Turkey. What’s not to understand?
If we supply Patriot missiles for Turkey, and the Syrians blow one of them up, that’s one thing. If its manned by American soldiers, and one of them gets blown up by Syria, that’s a whole 'nother kettle of piranha. Not so much an escalation as it is an invitation to a provocation.
And we’ve been hearing those “indications” that Assad might start using chemical weapons; Turkey might worry about being attacked by Scuds with chemical warheads.
So the Patriots can be used in an anti-aircraft as well as anti-missile role. I guess I just did not think that Turkey would need any further support for its air defenses.
Maybe Russia feels it’s in their best interest to bluff in every way imaginable.
I guess it was not clear earlier: The Patriot requests preceded the SCUD missile launches by weeks. Perhaps it is just good planning on the part of the Turkish military then.
So it’s an excuse to get NATO personnel into position? Seeing it this way I could see that as upsetting for Iran, Russia, and Syria.
I am only more perplexed b the response because I do not understand what offensive role these batteries serve beyond what capabilities Turkey already has militarily, but I can see it used as a shield for an offensive I guess.
The anti-aircraft role is actually what it was originally designed for, which is why it didn’t work all that well in Iraq. The current version, however, is optimized for interception of ballistic missiles rather than aircraft.
Patriots started life as anti-aircraft missiles, and and still fill that role. And updated version was modified for missile defense. It turns out that the success rate of the anti-missile Patriots may have been vastly overstated during the first gulf-war, and depending on who the analyst was, the success rate varied from 97% to 0%. I do not know whether it has been used, successfully or not, in real world conflict since then.
Also the IIRC military at the time pointed out that they were designed as “point defense” weapons, designed to defend a small area like a military base. Their small warhead was designed to damage the plane or missile so that it couldn’t continue on target (instead of blowing it to small fragments); but a city is basically too big to miss once the attacker is that close, and Saddam’s Scuds weren’t accurate anyway. The Patriots did knock Scuds off course - which would have worked fine if they’d been defending a base, but just caused them to land in a different part of the city in this case.
They were firing smaller tactical ballistic missiles, rather than Scuds, and the Patriots worked well. There really weren’t any Iraqi aircraft to shoot down; most of the Iraqi airforce was destroyed in the 1993 war, and most of the remaining pilots defected during the early stages of the second war.
Apparently many Scuds broke up on re-entry without any external force, which complicated the Patriot problem. The useful target was the warhead, but with half a dozen targets instead of one, it was a crapshoot as to whether the warhead was hit. The Wiki page on it says the Israelis counted the interception as a failure if the warhead reach the ground and exploded, no matter where it hit. The Americans, however, counted anything that didn’t hit a military target in Saudi Arabia as a success if a Patriot had been launched at it. Given the Scud is a famously inaccurate missile and American targets in SA were virtually needles in a vast haystack of desert, a high success rate was virtually guaranteed.
According to this CBS story, in the 2nd Gulf War, the Patriots only had a total of 12 engagements. In 3 of them they shot at friendly aircraft, and shot down two of those aircraft, killing 3 crewmen. In all honesty, I can’t say that is “performing well”, whether or not they hit the missiles they were also fired at.
The way I recall the news coverage of the time, the government made a show of deploying the Patriots, while the media mostly cheered rah-rah for the Bush government line and the commentary from the military that the Patriots weren’t really all that well designed for that particular job was at most mentioned in some tiny sidebar. Then when it looked like they were working there was even more cheering for them from the government and media. And then when it came out they weren’t working all that well the accusations started that the military had lied about them.
I misstated this slightly. In two engagements with friendly aircraft, the Partriots shot down the planes and killed the crews. In the third, the targeted f16 detected the Patriot tracking radar and fired an anti-radiation missile at it – destroying the Patriot’s radar before the missiles could be fired.
Also, according to the stories I read in finding these, those versions of Patriot were supposed to be exclusively for anti-ballistic missile use, and not for use against aircraft at all. They were mis-identified (somehow) as incoming ballistic missiles, not as hostile aircraft.