Apart from shooting down aircraft ( BBC 
) that is.
How did they really fare against the Iraqi missiles shot into Kuwait recently? A programme about the SDI a while ago cast doubt on the ability of the Patriots to defend Israel in the last Guld War, are they doing any better this time around?
They lied about their effectiveness last time, what makes you think they’d tell you if they don’t work this time?
The Patriots have been greatly improved since the first Gulf War in which they were pretty ineffective. The current one is actually called the Patriot 3. It remains to be seen whether or not it can do the job.
Even when the patriot successfully intercepted incoming scuds in the 1991 war, they did not cause enough damage to destroy the scud sufficiently to stop it causing damage when it landed.
Patriot 3 seems to work well enough on British aircraft though.
The Patriot was developed, originally, as an anti-aircraft missile, not as an anti-missile missile, and even the original version did pretty well in that role (and continues to do so, much to the regret of a couple of our UK friends, sorry to say). Trying to use it against missiles, as we did in the GW1, amounted to little more than a shot in the dark, as later studies pretty much confirmed.
Has the Patriot now been improved? I’m sure it has. Has it been improved enough to be an effective defense against missiles? We won’t know until a year or two from now, if history is any guide.
Gulf war PAT-1’s had a timing issue with their detonation, which caused a lot of them to explode next to the inbound missile, and not in front of it as it’s supposed to. That was pretty decently fixed in the PAT-2. The current PAT-3’s, as far as I know, now go for a contact ‘hit’ on the missile, and explode then for better efficiency.