reggie1963 wrote on Dec 25
th, 2022 at 5:52pm:
Its very hard to distinguish between jet, a guided missile or a $20000 rocket with no guidance.
If patriot could have stopped this from getting to the point it's at now, it would have been deployed earlier. Leaving it to now shows the confidence the US have in this system. Very little. The S-400 however is a very capable missile. And the US know it. Why do you think no Tomahawks or their new stealth cruise missile have not been used? The S-400 is that good it has locked up a whole tranche a defence force strategy.
In this environment it is useless. Watch the next coming weeks and see how they use it and what they use it on. Who is going to make the decision to fire the 3mUSD patriot at a target when you don't know and your systems can't tell, what is a high value target and what is a 20k decoy. Dilemma.
Check out Nulka and see what Australia did to render anti-ship missiles virtually useless.
And to be honest the US military went to sh*t the day after Reagan left. Successive US Governments both Republican and Democrat have used the military but never replenished it to its pre use capacity or as what should have happen is they should have thrown in another 15%. Neither Republican nor Democrat did this. BOTH PARTIES ARE GUILTY OF DEPLETING THE DEFENSE FORCE.
The Patriot system can tell the difference between:
a high flying missile, or fast cruise missile or an aircraft.
Cheap drones fly slowly at only 200km/hr.
The Yanks spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined.
No one knows what they really have -
there are many secret - black budget projects too.
They even have laser systems to shoot down missiles
but Ukraine hasn't been give any.