Lightning answer: Patriot battery destroys 6 missiles in 48 seconds and why it is a concern
Because here we are talking about whether it is possible to “overload” air defense with cheap ballistic missiles.
During the World Defense Show in Riyadh, the command of the Royal Saudi Air Force said that in 2019, one of their Patriot SAM batteries was able to shoot down 6 ballistic missiles in 48 seconds, which Yemeni Houthis used to try to hit the country’s critical infrastructure.
At first glance, this episode of repelling a massive missile attack during this “frantic minute” looks fascinating. But this episode also demonstrates the level of stress on the air defense system that an aggressor can create using even cheap short-range ballistic missiles. This was reported by The Drive portal.
According to the portal’s authors, it is not known for certain what type of Patriot missiles Saudi Arabia used to repel this attack – PAC-2 or PAC-3.
However, there is reason to believe that at least 12 Patriot missiles had to be used to intercept the Yemeni Houthis’ missiles, which in turn means that the cost of repelling the attack was about $100 million.
A separate nuance is that for this strike in 2019, the Yemeni Houthis most likely used either an unguided 210 mm caliber Badr-1 missile with a launch range of about 100 kilometers or its guided version Badr-2 with a range of up to 150 kilometers. In other words, it was about using means of attack that could be much cheaper than the same anti-aircraft missiles before Patriot.
Moreover, the authors of The Drive suggest that in this case we are talking about the episode of August 26, 2019, when the Yemeni Houthis fired 10 ballistic missiles at once at the Saudi city of Shizan. And it turns out that six of these missiles were intercepted in 48 seconds, but the other four reached the city and caused dozens of deaths and injuries.
A separate problem was that even Saudi Arabia sometimes faced the problem of a possible shortage of anti-aircraft missiles for the Petriots, which undermined its ability to repel Houthi air strikes. To understand the order of the numbers: from 2015 to 2017, the Saudi military shot down up to 100 ballistic missiles from the Yemeni Houthis, but by 2022, this figure had grown to 400 ballistic missiles and 800 kamikaze drones.
Given all of the above, the authors of The Drive raise the question of how problematic the aggressor’s attempt to overload Patriot air defense systems using short-range ballistic missiles could be.
