I also spent time at the Israeli battery, and of course paid calls on a number of senior Israeli commanders… not always an experience I’d care to repeat. In their view, America was holding them back from the retaliatory attack that was their right and their obligation. They were incredibly determined and incredibly frustrated, and they really beat up on me about it. Though they understood why we’d asked them to refrain from retaliating, this did not sit well with them, and I felt they would not sit back much longer.
Meanwhile, the Patriot crews had learned from each Scud attack.
There’ve been a lot of misconceptions about the Patriots and their capabilities… and about their perceived failures. Some reports even claimed — falsely — that they didn’t work at all, as though all the Scud warheads got through untouched. Let’s set the record straight.
First, the Patriots were designed to be point defense systems. That is, they were built to protect small areas like air bases or command centers. So if you’re at air base X, and you have your Patriots there, and the Patriots intercept and stop an attacking missile, fine. But whatever’s in the sky still has to come down. When all the junk left over from the Patriot and the attacking missile doesn’t crash down on the air base, that’s a success. But our Patriots had to defend the Tel Aviv-Haifa megalopolis. (We set up our batteries there; the Dutch battery was sent to defend Jerusalem.) When all that junk scatters over a metropolitan area like that, you’ve got problems. People say, “Wait a minute. What the hell? You obviously didn’t vaporize the thing. And a piece the size of an engine block just came through my roof.” I don’t want to deny this guy’s distress. His complaint’s legitimate. But we should also be aware that a Scud warhead going off in the same place would have ruined his day even worse.
Second, these were new systems. When the Patriots first went in, we had never used them in battle. The crews had to learn how best to engage them. They made mistakes. For instance, at first they put them on what you might call “automatic mode” (which is the fastest way to get missiles into the air against attacking missiles). But when they were on automatic, some of the Patriots were launching on atmospheric clutter. The lessons learned from these Patriot Gulf War experiences led to many needed improvements in the system.
To make matters even more difficult and complicated: The Iraqis were often shooting their Scuds at greater ranges than they were designed for (the Iraqi scientists had hot-rodded modifications that allowed them to reach Israel from western Iraq; some of their Scuds landed in the Mediterranean). But since the Scuds weren’t designed to take that kind of stress, they frequently broke up into hundreds of pieces during their descent.
When the lieutenant in the van saw these breakups in his scope, he had to make a choice fast: “What do I shoot at?” He’d pick out a likely piece in all the clutter, and shoot at it. If he didn’t pick the warhead, then it would continue on and blow up somewhere in Israel.
I know what the guys in the vans had to deal with. I saw the tape replays of previous engagements.
But these were very resourceful guys.
Later on, as they studied the tapes (they replayed them over and over), they came to realize that it was possible to distinguish the warhead from the clutter. The warhead, they began to see, continued to travel at its original velocity, while the other pieces slowed down. This was not at all obvious to an untrained eye. The difference was almost imperceptible. I couldn’t see it. These sharp young soldiers could.
Once they had that little gleam of an advantage, they began to be able to pick out the warhead and hit it. And as time went on, they got even more proficient.
All the noise about the shortcomings of the Patriots did not affect the Israeli public. The Patriot soldiers were their heroes. You could see Patriot logos on signs everywhere; and “Patriot” became the name du jour for all sorts of new products (I saw an advertisement for Patriot condoms). Now that the Israeli Patriot crews were the darlings of the people (my Israeli air defense officer escort, Colonel Romen Moshe, told me), everyone in the Air Force wanted to join the unit, which upset the pilots (who always consider themselves the elites in any air force).
Another learning experience for me took place at an Israeli military base where top Israeli missile experts had been gathered and set up at what they called “the Scud Farm.” The experts would go out the instant a Scud impacted, gather up all the pieces they could find, and bring them back and reconstruct what they could. (It was amazing how fast they could do that.) They’d lay them out in a large open area outside like a big 3-D jigsaw puzzle and study the configuration of the missile. There were several possible variations. What they learned gave them insights into Iraqi missile capabilities and how to counter them.
On a tour of the reconstructed Scuds at the Scud Farm (a few partially reconstructed Patriots were also there), I was given insights into what they had learned. “Look,” they said, pointing to a collection of Scud pieces, “here Saddam tried to enlarge the warhead.” And pointing toward another set: “In this case, he tried to increase its fuel capacity and give it more range.”
The Iraqis were running all kinds of science projects, using a long-obsolete Soviet missile as their test bed.
The last shot they took at Israel used an all-concrete warhead, which hit somewhere in the more or less trackless southern desert. Everybody laughed. “Well, Saddam is shooting a practice round,” they said. “He’s desperate. He’s run out of warheads.”
A scientist at the Scud Farm showed me a map on the wall with all the trajectories of the Scud shots. All of them were aimed in the general direction of Tel Aviv or Haifa except this one. It had a really weird trajectory, and they were seriously concerned about it. Rumors later floated that an Israeli nuclear plant facility was the actual target. If the concrete warhead had penetrated the plant’s containment shield, there could have been a terrible catastrophe.
A few days into my trip, I had visited all the Patriot batteries except the Dutch battery on a hill outside Jerusalem. “While you’re here,” my Israeli escort suggested, “you ought to visit the Dutch battery.”
“Sure,” I said. “It would be a great experience for me.” I had never been to Jerusalem before. Here was an opportunity not only to show the flag for the Dutch but to encounter the spiritual home of my own religion.
But when I checked in with the U.S. Embassy to get their okay for the visit, the ambassador turned me down. There was a lot of sensitivity and tension in Jerusalem at that time. The Palestinians had supported Saddam; and the ambassador thought it was best to low-key the American presence until things got quieter in the city. He didn’t want any Americans there, especially senior American military.
When I told that to my escort, the Israeli colonel, he was incensed. “The hell with that,” he announced. “That’s like saying we can’t protect you. This is our country. We can take you to Jerusalem. You’re safe with us. No problem.”
“This is not a security issue,” I protested, giving him the ambassador’s position as best I could. “It’s political sensitivities.”
“Well, to hell with that,” he said, all fired up. “It’s an insult to us.” And then he took the issue up with his bosses, who agreed with him: They all wanted Zinni to visit Jerusalem. It had become a matter of face to them.
At this point, I said to myself, “Hey, Zinni, the Israelis are already angry and poised to attack, and you’re down here to keep them happy.” For the past few days, we’d worked our tails off and I’d subjected myself to a lot of slings and arrows to keep them calm and now this Jerusalem thing could maybe get them upset. I knew I had to go to Jerusalem, but I also knew I had to minimize my footprint there.
“Look,” I told the Israelis, “I’ll go to Jerusalem, but we have to do it without stirring up anybody. We just visit the battery and come back.”
“Not a problem,” my escort said. “We’ll drive out very quietly, visit the battery, and that’s it.”
We took our trip out to the Dutch battery on February 28, and it went without a hitch. We met the commander and talked to the troops. Since no Scuds had been fired at Jerusalem, they hadn’t seen action, so they didn’t have a lot of operational information; but it was a good, friendly meeting. The view from their hill overlooking Jerusalem, however, was spectacular. This was the first time I’d seen the Old City of Jerusalem, and the religious and historical significance hit me powerfully.
