Will One Patriot Battery Make a Difference in Ukraine?

Dec. 22, 2022 (EIRNS)—Yesterday, President Joe Biden, with the deluded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at his side, announced that the latest weapons package that the U.S. will provide to Ukraine will include one Patriot air defense/anti-missile battery, along with an unspecified amount of missile ammunition. There is good reason, however, to question whether this single battery will make a difference on the battlefield of Ukraine.

A senior defense official told reporters at the Pentagon, “Our goal is to help Ukraine strengthen a layered, integrated approach to air defense.” He also said that it would work together with other, shorter-range air defense systems that the West has already provided to Ukraine. However, “Patriot does require training, and we expect it will take several months to ensure Ukrainian forces have the training they need to employ it successfully.” A single Patriot battery includes 6-8 launchers, a radar unit and a command-and-control section, along with support functions to include power and maintenance. It takes 90-100 troops to run a single Patriot battery, which is a technologically complex system. The senior defense official reported that “the Ukrainians will have to complete the training in order to be able to, you know, field the system. And it’s the Ukrainians who are operating the system, so that’s absolutely essential.”

The second problem relates to how much of an area can a single Patriot battery even cover, despite its capabilities against distant targets? Ukraine is getting one Patriot battery, but in 2013, NATO deployed six Patriot batteries to defend a NATO radar and two air bases in an area much smaller than Ukraine against threats allegedly stemming from Syria and Iran. While the Patriot can engage manned aircraft up to a range of 160 km, it can engage tactical ballistic missiles out to a range of 30 km, meaning that the area it can defend is very limited. As the Russians know well, a Patriot battery is also a soft target, meaning it can be easily destroyed. The Patriot system is also limited by the fact that its radar can only cover 120° of the horizon, which means that if the threat comes from a different direction than where it is facing, it can’t see it. “In the kind of environment we’re seeing in Ukraine, where threats can come in from multiple directions, you either have to have more radars or more batteries,” Ian Williams of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington told Agence France-Presse on Dec. 15.