http://taskandpurpose.com/saudi-arabia-patriot-missile-defense/America has been trading with China for too long and too much, sub -par chinese products have made their way into the Department of Defence too with the American mislie defense system suited better for shooting down birds than real missiles
“In early November, Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels fired a ballistic missile at the far-off Saudi capital of Riyadh, retaliation for Saudi Arabia’s aerial intervention against them in Yemen’s civil war. Luckily, Saudi defense officials said, the missile was tracked and destroyed by their U.S.-made Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) kinetic interceptor before it reached its target, King Khalid International Airport — potentially preventing a worse outcome from what CNN described as “the first time the heart of the Saudi capital has been attacked and… a major escalation of the ongoing war in the region.”
President Donald Trump captured the Patriot’s apparent triumph, and the treacherous regional politics behind the attack, as only he could: in a sales pitch that could have been for Flanagan auto parts, if Flanagan auto parts could start World War III. “A shot was just taken by Iran, in my opinion, at Saudi Arabia … and our system knocked the missile out of the air,” Trump told reporters on Nov. 5. “That’s how good we are. Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.”
Trump’s jab against the Iranians naturally started an international flap, but the sales part of his comments may have been wrong, too, with huge consequences, according to a month-long analysis detailed in the New York Times. The Saudi interceptors failed five separate times during the Riyadh attack, and bystanders in the missile’s target — the capital’s airport — recalled being rocked by a nearby ground explosion. Those reports could mean a failure that will alarm the 14 U.S. allies fast embracing the American-made missile-killer to counter threats from North Korea to Russia.
“The Houthis got very close to creaming that airport,” Jeffery Lewis, the analyst who led a group of independent missile experts and defense researchers in the painstaking month-long investigation, told the Times. “Governments lie about the effectiveness of these systems. Or they’re misinformed … and that should worry the hell out of us.”
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