MORE ‘PATRIOT GAMES’: GOVERNMENT OPS. COMMITTEE DISCREDITS PATRIOT CRITICS, CANCELS REPORT ON MISSILE’S PERFORMANCE
(Washington, D.C.): In a remarkable
move yesterday, the House
Government Operations
Committee declined to approve a highly
critical report on the performance
of the Patriot missile during the Gulf
war. In doing so, it took the
practically unprecedented step of
repudiating the Committee’s chairman,
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who
commissioned the report as part of his
personal campaign against missile
defenses.
This move is the more remarkable for
the fact that it occurred in a
congressional committee well known for
its partisanship. On this occasion,
several Democrats sided with Republican
members in rejecting the report. They did
so on the grounds that it was
seriously flawed due to deliberate gross
omissions and misrepresentations of key
testimony before the Committee and faulty
analysis of the Army’s review of
Patriot performance in the war. Insofar
as he had championed the report and even
put out press releases anticipating its
publication and touting its results, the
study’s rejection by the Committee is
tantamount to a vote of “no
confidence” in Rep. Conyers’
leadership — at least in
connection with missile defense
questions.
Incredibly, the Government
Operations Committee’s rejection of his
report has not prompted Chairman Conyers
to disavow this seriously flawed
document. To the contrary, there are
indications that he is preparing to
release it anyway with the disclaimer
that it is merely a “staff
report.” Rep. Conyers well
understands that neither the media
nor the public will appreciate the
subtle distinction between an official
document adopted by the members and one
put out by the staff who ostensibly work
for them.
GAO Gets It Right — For
Once
The Government Operations Committee
based its decision, in part, on an
analysis released yesterday by the
General Accounting Office. The
GAO thoroughly discredits the
work of the Patriot’s leading critic —
MIT science professor Theodore Postol.
To support his contention that the
Patriot did not successfully intercept
any Scuds over Israel or Saudi Arabia,
Dr. Postol relied on commercially
available video coverage of Scud missile
intercepts. His testimony before the
Committee was the centerpiece of highly
publicized and extraordinarily
politicized Government Operations
Committee hearings last spring.
Postol’s analysis was also the principal
basis for Rep. Conyers’ report and its
controversial findings.
According to the GAO analysis,
however, “The videos
produced by the television crews
cannot be relied upon as a data
source to reach conclusions on how many
Scud missiles were hit
or missed by the Patriot during the
Persian Gulf War.” GAO
sought the opinion of electro-optical
experts from academia, industry and
government, all of whom concluded
that the videos “are insufficient
and of inadequate quality to make such
conclusions.”
The unequivocal GAO analysis of Mr.
Postol’s work stands in stark contrast to
the series of misleading and — if not
politically motivated, certainly suspiciously
timed — reports by
“congressional watchdog”
agencies concerning missile defenses. One
such study, also commissioned by Conyers,
which charged the Department of Defense
with misrepresenting important test
results of SDI interceptors, appeared
just as critical decisions on SDI funding
were being made in Congress.
Recent initiatives by Senators Dale
Bumpers (D-AR) and Jim Sasser (D-TN)
aimed at gutting the SDI budget also
employed a Conyers-requested and
seriously flawed report by the
Congressional Budget Office.
And earlier this week, the GAO issued yet
another misleading study that claims the
Patriot successfully intercepted Scuds in
only 9 percent of the engagements. That
study’s sponsor? None other than John
Conyers.
Sitting Too Close to the TV
Yesterday’s GAO report, “Postol’s
Video Analysis,” squares
with testimony by Steve Hildreth, an
analyst at the Congressional Research
Service. Mr. Hildreth told the Government
Operations Committee in a hearing on 7
April that Dr. Postol’s video analysis
was “worthless.” Mr.
Hildreth’s testimony, however, was
conspicuously absent from the Conyers
draft report.
Among the GAO’s devastating
conclusions about Professor Postol’s work
were the following:
- “Observations from
video tapes are inherently
inaccurate because they
lack depth, they provide poor
image quality, and the Patriot
and Scud missiles are not visible
in the night background. - “The recording rate
of the video cameras — 30 frames
per second — is too slow to
capture the high speed events
needed to interpret Patriot/Scud
engagements. The frame
rate for cameras used during
performance testing of the
Patriot missile system records at
rates of 120 to 250 frames per
second. For example, the experts
estimate that the relative
position of the two objects can
change up to 70 meters during the
time it takes to generate one
video field with the type of
cameras used to record the
Patriot/Scud engagements.”
[Obviously, intercepts could have
taken place during this
unrecorded period.] - “Determination of
miss distance is not possible
from a single camera site using
only the information recorded by
that camera.” - “The ‘apparent
diameter of more than 100 meters’
stipulated by Professor Postol as
the size of the fireball produced
by the detonation of a Patriot
missile is incorrect. Officials
at White Sands Missile Range
provided a photograph of a
Patriot during daytime testing
that shows a burst pattern of
about ten meters. [Such a
100-meter fireball could, in
fact, be a combined Patriot/Scud
warhead explosion.] - “The video tapes do
not show complete engagements. A
member of the media stated that
he doubted that anyone got a
clean [camera] shot of any of the
engagements. Industry officials
said that they were told by the
media that the tapes were pooled
and that some splicing of the
tapes may have taken place. As a
result, the video tapes may
be showing segments from
different engagements.” (Emphasis
added throughout.)
The misleading quality of Mr.
Postol’s “expert” input was
only exacerbated by the testimony of
Israeli newspaper reporter Reuven
Pedatzur, who was presented as a
distinguished scholar at Tel Aviv
University (he actually simply lectures
there) and an expert on the Patriot
(which he is not). In criticizing the
Patriot’s effectiveness, Mr. Pedatzur
distorted comments made by Israeli Gen.
Avihu Ben-Nun, who had commanded Patriots
during the war.
The draft Conyers report, however,
neither mentions a letter from Gen.
Ben-Nun — in which he takes serious
exception to Mr. Pedatzur’s
mischaracterization of his views — nor
includes testimony by the U.S. commander
of all Patriot units in Israel, Col.
David Heebner. Col. Heebner said that Mr.
Pedatzur “has not [accurately]
represented the comments of General
Ben-Nun, who I was working with at that
time.”
In addition, the Conyers report
focused on early, less accurate Army
analysis of the Patriot’s performance.
Since those first analyses, the Army has
improved its evaluations — a fact that
the GAO, the Congressional Research
Service and the House Armed Services
Committee all have recognized, but Mr.
Conyers and his staff have chosen to
overlook.
Missing the Point on Point
Defense
Largely absent in the debate over the
Patriot’s effectiveness is any
recognition of the limited anti-missile
mission the air defense Patriot system
has been modified to perform. That
mission is nothing more than “point
defense” of an airfield or
ammunition depot. The system is simply
not suited for area defense, for example
of an entire city. Consequently, the
value of the Patriot should not be
measured by the effectiveness with which
it performs the latter role; instead, it
should be evaluated on the basis of the
fact that it alone offers near-term
protection against a threat the United
States and its allies are otherwise
utterly unable to meet.
Ironically, the logic of Rep. Conyers’
complaints about the inadequacies of the
Patriot system should lead him precisely
where he does not want to go: namely,
to the conclusion that the United
States urgently needs more effective
means of dealing rapidly with short and
longer-range ballistic missile threats
around the world. And there
is no more militarily- or cost-effective
solution to this need than the Brilliant
Pebbles space-based interceptor.
Separate studies conducted by the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
and the RAND Corporation concluded that a
limited constellation of Brilliant
Pebbles would have been effective against
every one of the 85 Scuds launched by
Iraq in the war. This
highlights one of the key advantages of
space-based defenses over land-based
interceptors:
- They are global and
continuously available
— not confined to specific
territory or hampered by the
requirement for time-consuming
redeployment to foreign soil in
the event of a crisis. - They are also inherently capable
of providing protection
over vast areas. - And perhaps most importantly, by
virtue of their ability to
perform boost-phase intercepts of
ballistic missiles, they can interrupt
an attack while it is still over
enemy territory, not as
it is above the defended real
estate. This is of
surpassing importance if the
incoming missiles are outfitted
with chemical or biological
agents — whose dissemination may
actually be improved by
a terminal-phase intercept from a
Patriot-style system.
Rep. Conyers nevertheless remains one
of the most vociferous critics of the
Brilliant Pebbles program and has
consistently led efforts to derail
funding necessary for its development.
Indeed, his transparent ulterior motive
in railing against the Patriot system is
to undermine political support for all
anti-missile defenses.
The Bottom Line
In his single-minded pursuit of this
goal, Rep. Conyers has clearly
indulged in intellectually dishonest
practices and seriously compromised the
reputation of his Committee on Government
Operations. Should Conyers now
choose to countermand the will of his
colleagues on that committee, to release
the document they deemed so flawed as to
refuse to be associated with it and to
circulate it as a committee “staff
report,” the impropriety and
unethical character of his behavior
should be made an issue in the House of
Representatives. At the very
least, the conclusions of this document
should be as studiously ignored by
serious members of Congress and the press
as the report itself ignores balanced
inquiry and the facts.
– 30 –
1. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled “Patriot
Games: Opponents of Effective Missile
Defenses Inadvertently Make Case for
SDI,” (
April 1992).
2. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled, “‘B-S’
Patrol #5: ‘You’re No John Kennedy’ —
Flip-Flops by Swing Senators on SDI
Aren’t Exactly Profiles in Courage,”
(3. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled, “‘B-S’
Patrol #4: Bumpers-Sasser Reliance on
CBO’s ‘Bum Dope’ Jeopardizes Strategic
Defense, National Security,” (
September 1992).
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