The PAC3 Scam

I am glad I have only one country to sacrifice for my life says Zelensky

More on the recent Russian strikes against Ukraine July 2 to July 6. Think PAC Man!

The Ukrainians usually insist they are shooting down not everything but a large proportion of incoming. Now they are complaining about not being able to shoot down anything.

At least that was the headline….

But wait a moment, this is EuroNews. And is quoring UkoNazi soures.

Look at the text.

The US-made Patriot system remains Ukraine’s only effective defence against ballistic missiles, but officials say supplies of interceptors have fallen critically low.

Ukraine’s air defences failed to intercept any of the 29 ballistic missiles launched by Russia during the attack overnight on 6 July, air force spokesperson Colonel Yurii Ihnat confirmed, saying the interception “success rate is low, to put it mildly.”

Ihnat did NOT say Ukrainian AD failed to intercept ANY missiles – he said that success rate was very low – which might mean they just knocked down one. ???

Did he say that Ukraine had no supplies of PAC3 missiles? No.

Did he say that they had NOT fired any at all? No. Because the building you just saw was destroyed by a PAC3 falling back to earth after missing its target. This was not the only residential building hit.

But we know the Russians don’t target such buildings and that most civilian casualties in their strikes are caused by AD misses, so Ukraine was firing off volleys of precious PAC3 missiles despite little likelihood of success.

Why “little likelihood” . Because the success rate of the PAC3 is overstated.

Ted Postol

Dr. Postol remains a prominent skeptic of success claims.

Applying the same physics-based scrutiny he used during the 1991 Gulf War, and which was heavily criticized — until eventually proven correct, Postol argues that the narrative of the Patriot’s dominance in Ukraine is heavily distorted by wartime propaganda.

The Problem of False Intercepts

Postol asserts that when a complex missile like the Iskander or Kinzhal enters its terminal phase, it often undergoes extreme thermal or aerodynamic stress, or it may deploy decoys. If the missile naturally fragments or sheds sections of its rocket body, a PAC-3 interceptor might strike the falling debris rather than the heavy, armored explosive warhead.

To an observer on the ground, this looks like a spectacular explosion and a successful intercept, but the warhead itself still plummets to the ground and detonates on target.

Flawed Data Verification

He argues that public evidence—such as photos of downed missile fragments—is often misinterpreted. Postol emphasizes that showing a hole in a missile component does not prove the kinetic interceptor neutralized the warhead before impact.

Overwhelming the System:

Postol emphasizes that even if the PAC-3 works under pristine conditions, it cannot cope with saturation tactics. Russia frequently launches complex, multi-axis salvos combining subsonic drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles to exhaust the Patriot’s limited radar capacity and interceptor stockpiles

From my vantage point as a sometime consultant with military contractors, this argument makes a lot of sense.. And sources here in Japan, which uses PAC3 would agree. Right now the Japanese are worried their Patriot and Aegis systems would be ineffective against Russian or Chinese hypersonic weapons with maneuvering warheads.

The raw performance parameters of the Kinzhal and Zircon place them entirely outside the combat capabilities of the Patriot PAC-3 system and also Aegis.

The Kinzhal travels at speeds exceeding Mach 10 and follows an aero-ballistic trajectory. T he PAC-3’s tracking and engagement radar cannot process data fast enough to establish a definitive weapon lock on an object moving that quickly.

The Zircon is a true scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missile capable of speeds up to Mach 9. The missile’s low-altitude hypersonic flight path prevents early detection, leaving Western air defenses with virtually zero reaction time

These weapons do not travel in predictable paths.-- both the Kinzhal and Zircon perform extreme, high-G evasive maneuvers during their final terminal dive toward a target and these rapid changes in direction, combined with an almost vertical homing angle, making it mathematically impossible for a PAC-3 kinetic interceptor to align its path and achieve a “hit-to-kill” collision

Russian hypersonic missiles have successfully targeted and destroyed the Patriot batteries themselves since the active radar emissions of the Patriot system act as a beacon.

So weapons like the Kinzhal are intentionally deployed in SEAD “suppression of enemy air defense.

All this is confusing and contradictory in the face of Ukrainian statements and OSINT propaganda.

Let’s simplify .

The Kiev regime is losing badly on the battlefield and its military infrastructure is being destroyed by stepped up Russian attacks, with ever upgraded missiles and also advanced drones. Keep in mind that the vast majority of the recent attacks were drones, many of them jet powered, hard to shoot-down types with 90 kg warheads. The ratio is 8 or 9 to one.

Thanks to Russian SEAD and misuse, Ukraine has little left of launchers and interceptors .

Of course, the Ukrainians claim a 90% success rate against drones, including Geran 4 and 5—but ONLY using million dollar Patriot, NASAAMS, and IRIS-T systems. These drones cost at most around $100,000. NASAAM and IRIS-T up to 4 million and are normally launched two at a time.

I assure you they are short of those systems too, and the money to buy more.

In the end, it all comes down to money.

Kiev losing

So all this stuff about Kievan civilians dying, residential buildings hit by Russian missiles for lack of PAC3 comes down to “give us money”.

“Us” of course means Zelensky. He will accept dollars or coke — or both.

From the article that I began with it is obviously that Z knows that the US and Israel’s war on Iran has depleted almost a third of the global stockpile of Patriot interceptors, the Gulf states alone having collectively fired more than 1,100 of them in the past few months.

Lockheed Martin produces roughly 600 interceptors a year, or about 60-65 per month. Before the Chinese tightened up restrictions on rare earths it took the US over twice as long—a year— to produce a PAC3 round as it did the Russians to produce an S400 round (despite the superiority of the S400) — so how long now?

There won’t be enough Patriots to meet all US and allied needs, keeping in mind that it missiles are normally fired at least 2 at a time.

De-industrialization is a bitch.

Not that it really matters

Postol calculates a success rate of 0% against hypersonic MARVs. Other optimistic sources say 10%.

So, in lieu of hardware — Zelensky wants money.

The war is lost. And he needs the cash to move.

He has a villa in Tuscany. But it’s modest and only $4 million. He needs to upscale and upgrade.

Maybe Canada? It got lots of Ukranian Nazis after WWII. And it is giving him bundles of cash, almost a billion, which should help.

My point is that at this point all this talk about PAC3 and new weopons for Ukraine is just a way to keep the money train on the rails. It’s a scam!

The Wolf Man

When I was a teenager, my constant companion was a large wolf-hybrid called unimaginatively “Wolf”, which became one of my nicknames.

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