Mythbusting SAM systems

Looking on the forum, esp. “Military situation in SO/Georgia” thread, seems many questionable claims about air defense/western air force/Patriot SAM systems have re-emerged after being beaten in the past, so I thought it may be of use to post some things (with references) to combat few popular yet untrue myths. Even had to re-register since lost my account info from old times 🙂

So, this thread is about ‘Patriot r INVincible no Myssile to go by’ and ‘EM on Israel plane pwns any SAM’ myths 🙂
If you already know the true situation about those, then sorry for posting, but feel free to post a link to this thread for those still infected with those myths 😉

Some facts, for the starters:
Debunking the “near 100%” Patriot efficiency myth (proudly invented by George H. W. Bush, w/o any reliable sources, yet cited everywhere)
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/gao/im92026.htm
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992_h/h920407p.htm
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/19/60minutes/main601241.shtml
The Fifth Estate: The Best Defence [Television program]. Toronto, Ontario: CBC. (can be downloaded from various torrent sources)
and other links, just google ‘Patriot controversy’.
In short, some things about Patriots that can be extracted from various sources:
1) Up to 4 Patriots were fired at each incoming Scud due to confirmed high unreliability of 1-v-1 interceptor-vs-missile situation.
2) Israel was not satisfied with Patriots and even wanted to develop their own system instead (read: SpyDer).
3) Patriot had many software flaws that ultimately led to friendly fire in several cases (taking down US and British aircraft), and false detections in many cases.
4) Most of those speaking about interceptors in ‘popular newsletters’ doesn’t understand how exactly interceptors work.
5) Patriots, prior to PAC-3, were hardly ABM systems at all; those were ‘classic’ AD systems, and quite bad when tasked with destruction of missiles; even their anti-aircraft capability was, hmm, only shown by taking down friendly aircraft.

As for another myth, “aircraft-based Israel ECM completely defeats Russian SAM during Operation Orchard” (claimed once, then debunked by any serious military analyst, yet also cited everywhere):
1) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/world/middleeast/12syria.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7463044.stm
3) http://russiatoday.ru/scitech/news/17783/video (interview wth Pantsir developer)
4) http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003771.html
and again, others.

To put it short, there are much more evidence that
1) Pantsir systems weren’t present at the time of raid at all.
2) There were no air defenses and even no barbed wire around ‘mystery target’ (so it doesn’t look like military facility at all).
3) Israelis claim to have breached SAMs by ‘network hack’ and even ‘taking over as system administrator’ (!) Obviously that implies intelligence success and possible infiltartion of Syrian SAM teams by Israelis agents. Hacking SAM sites from the aircraft, afresh? No, please.
4) There was no ‘jamming’ detected by Syrians; their radars showed… nothing (not even EW interference). For those familliar with idea of jamming, it pretty much means there was no actual warplane-vs-SAM engagement; that only supports idea of command posts being hacked to ignore radar data.
As an exaggerated and fantastic example, think of the following: your spy sneaks into enemy SAM post, and then takes off radar screen and replaces it with exact – showing ‘all clear’ – yet totally non-functional copy. Even if the radars in question would’ve worked perfectly, no one will see what they are reporting.
Yet again like in case of Patriot myth above, DEBKAfile and others started shouting ‘Israelis jam any SAM!’ way before any credible information could be collected.

There are also a collection of other myths around, usually coming in two shapes: overrating US SAMs (on pro-US forums) and overrating Russian air force (on pro-Russian forums). To put it simply, both are believed to be quite weaker than their competitors (US SAMs weaker than Russian, Russian jets weaker than American).

Here’s a greatly simplified way to understand why.
During Cold War, Soviets had no reasonable way to get an military airbase near US borders (obvious when looking at the map), while US had a formiddable naval carrier fleet and could’ve encircled USSR with military air bases given its allies in Europe and Asia.
So US invested into aviation, asking its allies to research various SAMs (Stinger missiles anyone?) while USSR invested into SAMs, positioning its aviation facilities in non-Russian SSRs and Eastern Bloc countries (Ukrainian ‘largest jet in the world’ anyone?)
When looking deeply onto developments there, and including recent developments, there are quite good collection of facts to realistically judge performance of corresponding aviation and SAMs.
Yet, unfortunately, most stick to the beaten-horse myths spread around instead of actually researching the subject.
Posted in hope that all this info (nothing new actually) may help those coming with only basic, newspapers-based knowledge of SAM systems. For those familliar with the subject, yet still reading 🙂 hopefully it was still interesting 🙂