The Patriot Flawed?

Feb. 19, 2004

"It's clear that the failure to correct some of the problems we've known about for 10, 12 years led to...fliers dying needlessly." — Joseph Cirincione

(CBS) Weapons experts say problems with the Patriot missile system, which the Army knew could cause it to shoot down friendly aircraft, were not fixed before the weapon was deployed in Iraq. Three allied pilots were mistakenly killed as a result.

The experts, former Congressional investigator Joseph Cirincione and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Phillip Coyle, appear in Correspondent Ed Bradley’s report to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

An American Patriot missile battery shot down a British Tornado fighter plane, killing its two crew members on March 23, 2003. Also, in an April 2 incident, another Patriot battery shot down an American F-18 from the U.S.S Kitty Hawk, killing its pilot, Navy Lt. Nathan White.

"It's clear that the failure to correct some of the problems we've known about for 10, 12 years led to...fliers dying needlessly," says Cirincione, who was appointed by Congress in 1991 to investigate the Patriot's performance in the First Gulf War.

Cirincione found that the Patriot missile system, which is built by the Raytheon Corp., had just a 10 percent success rate in the first Gulf War, often firing at missiles that were not there. In the 1990s, however, tests indicated it also could be dangerous to friendly pilots.

A 1996 Pentagon report said the Patriot had "very high fratricide levels" in tests in the early '90s, and other reports cite friendly-fire problems again in exercises in 1997, 2000 and 2002. In one exercise, a Patriot system with simulated missiles "fired on" a formation of four American F-16s, aircraft that would have been shot down, had the Patriot's missiles been real.

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Phillip Coyle, who oversaw those tests, tells Bradley that military commanders knew the Patriot system repeatedly misidentified friends as enemies in exercises.

"I believe [military commanders] were [aware of the problems] but the focus was on hitting a target. Other issues, such as friendly fire, didn't get the same...priority," says Coyle.

This does not surprise Cirincione, who says his Patriot findings from the First Gulf War were rejected by the Army: "There's a tendency in all our weapons systems to try to play up the good news and get it through its performance evaluations.”

Money flowed into the Patriot program after the Gulf War because most thought it was a successful weapon.

"The Patriot is a multi-billion dollar system. There's a lot of money...[and] careers involved," says Cirincione.

Lt. White and the British fliers died because of what military commanders have described as a computer glitch, when Patriot systems apparently misidentified their planes as enemy missiles.

But those weren't the Patriot's only engagements with friendly planes in this war. On March 25, 2003, an American F-16 pilot got a signal that led him to believe he was about to be fired on. He fired one of his own missiles in self-defense and hit the radar that had sent the signal -- another Patriot battery.

Robert Riggs, a reporter from the CBS owned station in Dallas, KTVT-TV, was embedded with the Patriot battery that the F-16 fired on. He says the system often misidentified targets: "[Operators] were seeing what were called spurious targets that were identified as incoming tactical ballistic missiles. Sometimes they didn't exist at all; other times they were identifying friendly U.S. aircraft as incoming TBMs.”

But there were other close calls. In one instance, says Riggs, he saw operators intent on their screens, about to launch missiles, "and suddenly the door flies open and a Raytheon tech representative runs in and says, 'Don't shoot. Don't Shoot.'"

Pentagon, Army and Raytheon officials all declined to talk to 60 Minutes on camera.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/19/60minutes/main601241.shtml