I heard they had been upgraded, and the Ukrainians claimed to have some success with them before they got blasted by the Russians.
Oh well. It's impossible to know what's going on in the World. The more I try to find out, the more certain I am in the Matrix and reality is being created for us rather than related to us.
“MIM-104 Patriot “Yahalom”, a high to medium air defense (HIMAD) medium tactical air defense platform capable of downing aircraft and ballistic missiles. Israel’s Patriot missile systems have been technologically upgraded since entering service.”
From all I can find, the Israeli version is the top of line. I certainly hope I’m missing something. The news of our incredibly over priced military just seems to get worse and worse. It absolutely floors me that in the middle of fending off everything NATO has, the Russians are set to spend $72Billion this year on defense! That’s less than one tenth the US expenditure.
IIRC, in the first month of action Iraq fired a total of 48 at scuds against American positions that had the new Patriot interceptors. Only 1 of those scuds hit target. The other 47 were either blown out of the sky by a Patriot, or the Patriot exploded near enough to the scud to deflect it off course. 47 out of 48 is a good success rate.
Later in the war the military tried to use the Patriot to intercept scuds not coming directly at targets near the Patriot. In other words, the Patriot would have to chase down the scud. That's when the "failures" would happen (in quotes because the first version weren't designed for that, though it was probably good ways to test it to learn what had to be upgraded). That's what the "Star Wars" mocking media told us about over and over in the Iraq war to "prove" they were right all along to say that Reagan's missile defense was a pipe dream and couldn't happen. But that'd be like saying a submarine is a failure if it can't act well as an aircraft carrier -- something it wasn't designed to do. And of course, lessons were learned since then (in part from testing the early Patriot beyond it's original intended scope) and newer versions can handle those situations better.