Theodore Postol presents video evidence that the Patriot PAC-3 missile interceptor has a near-zero success rate against ballistic missiles
MIT professor Theodore Postol is interviewed by Glenn Diesen about the Patriot PAC-3 missile defense system's actual performance in combat.
Summary
Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security at MIT and former Pentagon adviser, presents video-based analysis showing the Patriot PAC-3 achieves only a 2–3% intercept rate against ballistic missiles — far below the 90%+ rate claimed by manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. He draws a direct parallel to his earlier work after the 1991 Gulf War, when he and colleague George Lewis demonstrated that the Patriot PAC-2's claimed 96% intercept rate was in fact zero in terms of actual warhead destruction — a finding initially suppressed and attacked before being vindicated by an American Physical Society panel. Postol highlights that during a congressional hearing at the time, the Army's program executive officer defined an 'intercept' as merely a Patriot and a Scud passing in the sky — illustrating the depth of institutional misrepresentation. He also notes that Lockheed Martin's own promotional simulation video, when analyzed carefully, shows the interceptor missing the warhead entirely, inadvertently confirming his findings. He further argues that Iranian countermeasures — including maneuvering warheads, rocket-propelled reentry vehicles, submunitions, and electronic decoys — make the Patriot system essentially useless, and that the continued purchase of these systems represents a massive misallocation of resources based on false performance claims. At $4 million per missile with two typically fired per engagement, and an estimated 2–3% success rate, he calculates the cost of a successful intercept at approximately $80–100 million per ballistic missile destroyed — a fiscally catastrophic proposition for governments relying on these systems for defense.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Patriot PAC-3's claimed versus actual performance
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Professor Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security at MIT. He's an expert in nuclear delivery systems, missiles, and missile defense, and he has also worked as a former adviser to the Pentagon. Thank you for coming back on the program. Great to see you again.
Theodore Postol: It's my great pleasure, as always. Go ahead. Sorry.
Glenn Diesen: I wanted to ask you today about the Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, because you have probably been the leading voice in discussing how ineffective they have been. You can argue that the inefficiency of this has a huge cost for the United States as well — he wants to sell these weapons, but delusion also has a high price. I was wondering what you can say about them, because of course they are an important component of the US alliance system. They were used and are still used extensively in the war against Iran, and Trump himself approved at the NATO summit for Ukraine to get licensing rights to produce Patriots. So it is quite an important topic. Please feel free to unpack your argument.
Theodore Postol: Let me just slightly expand on the points you were making. We hope it won't occur, but Europe is talking about war with Russia, which I think is delusionary — but that's another discussion. I think it's extremely important that European military and political leaders understand that there can be no defense from the Patriot PAC-3 against Russian ballistic missiles. This is an important finding if you believe that these systems can play a role in future wars. It's also problematic with regard to the beginning, or reopening, of hostilities in the Southwest Asia war, because whether or not you have Patriots, it turns out you won't be able to defend against ballistic missiles with them either. In addition, there are vast expenditures being contemplated for additional Patriots — particularly by the US government and of course governments that purchase Patriot with US support — and if these systems don't provide any real defensive capability, this is an important matter for military planning as well as political leadership to understand. So this is not a minor issue, although it is a technical detail. It is quite important.
The 1991 Gulf War precedent — Postol and Lewis's original findings
We've had this debate before. My joke with my friends is that for me this is a déjà vu all over again. If I just show you a slide or two here — if we look at past experience, my colleague George Lewis and I published an article in 1993 after the Gulf War of 1991. In that article, we laid out the technology and the scientific foundation for determining whether or not Patriot in the Gulf War of 1991 actually worked.
Now, the history of this has been rewritten. I discovered this when I was in Poland giving a talk — there's a whole new history of what actually happened. The new history is that they initially thought it worked, then they realized it didn't work because of a congressional investigation. Of course, the congressional investigation occurred because of this particular article and the work of Lewis and Postol. So it didn't just happen to occur. It was because of our work.
We were attacked ferociously, to the point that quite frankly I thought my life was under threat. This was not a minor attack on the part of Raytheon. They went after me through the MIT administration. This was a very unpleasant experience and taught me that all this talk about scholarly freedom — certainly at MIT — is not the case.
But in any case, six years later — it took a long time — there was a study published in the same refereed journal by a panel of the American Physical Society. What this article said right in the abstract was that they found an absolute contradiction between the Army's claims about Patriot's performance in the Gulf War and, for all the engagements they scored in our video data. So we found that the claims initially — President George H.W. Bush was misled. We later found out he believed that 41 out of 42 Patriot engagements had been successful. So this was like a 96% intercept rate. His Secretary of Defense at the time, Dick Cheney, also believed that this was the case.
Now, this is in some sense a piece of history, and you might argue it has no significance. But it's kind of a replay of what we're seeing among the European leadership and other leaderships who seem to believe without evidence that this system has capability. And it's clear that they're relying on this, or they have been relying on this. In fact, the system has not been working since the Gulf War of 1991. So at some level, you could argue it doesn't matter because it's never been working. But if anyone is thinking that they can depend on this system, or that they should be spending tens of billions of dollars or more for more Patriot interceptors so they can defend themselves, this is a serious problem.
In addition, the panel stated unequivocally that the techniques that Lewis and Postol used in determining Patriot's performance in the Gulf War of 1991 were scientifically sound. And so if we use those techniques again, you should be able to understand Patriot's performance in 2026.
The congressional hearing — what the Army meant by "intercept"
Just to give you a sense of how serious the attempts to misrepresent the performance of Patriot were during this period — when George and I first published our analysis — here's a quote from what actually happened in a congressional hearing. I was at the hearing. I was being attacked by members of Congress who were just repeating what they had been told. At one point, the chair of the committee, who was very skeptical, asked the program executive officer, General Drole, what the Army meant by "intercept," because I had just shown videos that demonstrated there were no intercepts. And Drole responded, "Well, what did the president mean when he said 41 out of 42 were intercepts?" What Drole said — to a lot of laughter — was, "Well, what we mean by an intercept is a Patriot and a Scud passed in the sky." So that's how extraordinary the situation was at that time.
The Patriot PAC-2 versus PAC-3 — design differences and cost
Now, one of the things people might not understand is that the Patriot we analyzed at the time was the Patriot PAC-2, not the Patriot PAC-3, which is the more modernized version. The Patriot PAC-2 is a big, heavy missile. It works differently from the Patriot PAC-3, which is a much smaller and lighter interceptor. Two things are important. First, the Patriot PAC-2, even though it's a larger, heavier missile, cost about a million dollars each. But the Patriot PAC-3, which is substantially more technically sophisticated and roughly one-third the weight, costs $4 million each. So typically the firing doctrine is that you should fire two Patriot PAC-3s at a ballistic missile in order to have a significant chance of intercepting it. The contractors — which are Lockheed Martin, now along with Raytheon — are still claiming a more than 90% intercept rate.
So the argument, or the rewritten history, is: we thought we had a 96% intercept rate; we discovered in fact the truth was Lewis and Postol demonstrated that the intercept rate was not 96% but was in fact zero in terms of destruction of the Scud warhead. So it was a big difference between the reality that was discovered and pointed out by Lewis and Postol. And now of course they just happened to discover this — they don't explain, of course, that the history shows they lied repeatedly, that they were involved in attempts to intimidate the researchers, that they tried to bring the administrations of the university where I was a tenured full professor to try to intimidate me. Pressure was brought on me financially as well as administratively by the university. So this was not an easy situation.
Now we're back at the same situation. We now have a situation where they're again claiming a 90% intercept rate. And it turns out the evidence — the video evidence, which the panel of the American Physical Society found was in fact usable to determine whether or not Patriot was intercepting warheads — shows clearly and unambiguously that the Patriot intercept rate now is maybe 2 or 3%. So this is the more advanced Patriot PAC-3, which costs $4 million each, not $1 million each. You fire two of them — $8 million in an intercept engagement — and it looks like the engagement success rate is maybe 2 or 3%. So you're spending $80 million or $100 million to intercept a ballistic missile, given the intercept rate of this missile. And these companies now want governments to spend more money again on this system, which is clearly not working, in order to defend against ballistic missiles. This is simply not a good situation.
How the Patriot PAC-3 is designed to work — and why it fails
So let me just quickly show you what the Patriot PAC-3 is supposed to do, which is different again from the Patriot PAC-2. The Patriot PAC-2 has a radar that's literally in the interceptor — it homes on a reflected radio signal from a ground-based radar. The Patriot PAC-3 is cued to a target by the ground-based radar, but then as it goes toward the target, it homes on the target using its own radar. With this radar, it tries to find the front end of the target and kinetically destroy the warhead by running into it. So this is a direct hit-to-kill warhead. The Patriot PAC-2 had an explosive warhead on it and tried to damage the incoming missile or detonate the warhead with fragments — that turned out to be completely incapable of doing the job. So they went to this much more advanced hit-to-kill system, which costs $4 million each rather than $1 million each. And it depends on being able to be accurate enough to hit the front end of the missile. If it hits the back of the missile, the warhead will simply break off and go to the ground and explode.
Let me show you what Lockheed Martin shows in a video you can find on the web. This is Lockheed Martin's own simulation of an intercept attempt — what they find is an example of an intercept attempt. So this is the target. We have a rough estimate of the target's radar cross-section. It's a very small radar cross-section, which means that the distance at which the interceptor can detect the incoming target is relatively small — only a few kilometers. Which means that the interceptor only has a very limited maneuver time. Basically, the interceptor is maneuvering to hit this target. So this is a simulation showing the thousands of seconds before the actual intercept. We see the interceptor getting closer and closer. And then this is the last video frame — it hits the target. The warhead — it misses the warhead. So we know from our simulations, from data from the Gulf War of 1991 and data from the Gulf War of 2026, that if you hit the missile body and not the warhead, the warhead is going to go onto the ground undamaged and explode. So what they're showing in their own video is that the system will be defeated — their own simulation shows the interceptor was defeated. They didn't even understand that from the earlier analysis my colleague George Lewis and I had done from the Gulf War of 1991.
Video evidence from recent attacks — what a real intercept looks like
Now let's look at the video data. Remember, the video data is going to show you what is actually happening. So let's start looking at the video data. We're going to see probably 50 or 100 warheads coming in, and we only see one intercept. I'll show you the intercept in slow motion. What you're seeing now is no evidence of any intercepts. And I'll show you what an intercept looks like so you'll know exactly what to look for in future videos.
So here are all these missiles coming in, and you're going to see an intercept here. This particular warhead is going to be destroyed by a Patriot. You see the whole sky lights up because the explosion of the warhead is very dramatic. You're seeing this at one-tenth speed. And you'll see here is the remnant of the intercept, but you see two of the three warheads go onto the ground. And when they explode on the ground, you see very bright flashes. So in the roughly 50 or 100 missiles coming in, there was one intercept.
So the real-time mass attack should look like this — there should be intercepts everywhere. If you had a 90% intercept rate, you should be seeing intercepts everywhere. I'm showing you these little circles. You don't see that. In other words, you don't see what should look like a July 4th fireworks display. You just see these missiles coming in. You don't see any evidence of successful intercepts.
Now here we have another example of no intercepts. This is in slow motion. We'll see a bright flash in the sky — that's from a bright ground explosion — and then we're going to see a submunition release. There's a second ground explosion which lights up the sky. So that's another failed intercept. And now we see something coming in and submunitions being dispensed, and then another ground explosion. So this was a compound warhead. What we actually saw here was a warhead that was a big explosive warhead and it also dispensed submunitions. Then we see — because this is slow motion — another warhead coming in, the submunitions being dispensed and falling to the ground, and a ground explosion. No evidence of any intercepts at all here. What we instead see are these anti-personnel-sized submunitions falling to the ground, plus this bright flash from the warhead that dispensed the submunitions. This is a very, very complex target.
Here again we have Tel Aviv — no intercept. Here again we're going to see a Patriot dive to the ground, and then we're going to see evidence of another intercept in the sky that's very bright, but no other bright explosions. So again, what we should be seeing if there's a 90% intercept rate is the sky filled with bright explosions of intercepts. Again, the video evidence is showing you that the intercept rate is very low — maybe 1 or 2%.
So the video reveals unambiguously — if you know what you're looking for — that the Patriots are not successfully making intercepts at all. Here again is the same thing. This is one of the Alpha warheads coming in. It shows you at very high speed. No evidence of an intercept. An explosion on the ground. In this case, we see a shock wave propagating out because the violence of the explosion is so high — the Alpha comes in at a speed where its equivalent weight in TNT is added to the explosive power of the warhead as well. So it's an even more intense explosion.
Here we see a rapidly maneuvering warhead. We can see that the warhead is rapidly maneuvering because we see it zigzagging. We again see an attack coming in — just a line of warheads coming in — and we'll see one intercept out of these many dozens, many scores of warheads. There's the intercept, but that's in real time. I'm going to slow it up into slow motion so you can see what you're looking for. Anyone who has a video and can slow it up into slow motion can identify the intercepts easily. There's the intercept. And if you focus on the bright area, you don't see any bright object coming through relative to the object that was coming in initially. So that's a clear intercept.
Conclusions from the video evidence — the real cost of failure
So we can end this now and discuss the question of what is really going on here. I think the answer is that we have unambiguous evidence — overwhelming, unambiguous evidence — that the Patriot PAC-3, the more advanced interceptor that costs $4 million each, typically two of which are fired at a ballistic missile in order to intercept it, has a 2 or 3% intercept rate. Let's say it's 2% — one out of 50 engagements. So we have 100 interceptors fired in order to intercept a single ballistic missile. That's its effectiveness.
This is not a good situation if you're worried about being torn to pieces by ballistic missile attacks from Iran and you're Israel. And I can show — that's another long talk — that the Iron Dome has also got a near-zero intercept rate. So what we have been having is a giant deception in terms of what the public is being told about how much protection they're getting from missile defenses. One of the reasons for it — not the sole reason — is that the contractors are getting hundreds of billions of dollars by falsely claiming that these intercept systems are working. And this is a tremendous drain on European, American, and other countries that are buying these missile defense systems in the hope of mitigating the consequences of ballistic missile attacks.
It certainly has higher-order implications for what could happen if we have a general war or general wars where these missiles are going to be used. We now know that countries like Iran and certainly Russia can manufacture very large numbers of ballistic missiles with conventional warheads and do tremendous levels of damage with those missiles. Their accuracies have gotten very high and their warhead weights are significant — we're talking about one and a half tons of high explosives, which can do very considerable damage. So this is the situation we're now facing. And it's extremely important that both political and military leadership understand this.
We also know that Israel has very strict limitations on what the media is allowed to cover. It's very open now — not a great secret — how much destruction happened in Israel that they didn't want to reveal during the Iranian attack. We also know from satellite photos that the US was not very open about the destruction of its bases across the Middle East. So again, the destruction was much greater than what was reported during the war.
The future of air defense — survivability of Patriot radar units
Glenn Diesen: What is the main importance here?
Theodore Postol: I've been thinking about this. I'm not sure I fully understand the main importance. But the most profound possibility — which I think is real — is that the existence of air defenses for military purposes may turn out to no longer be possible. Keep in mind that ballistic missiles are becoming more and more accurate, so they can potentially target Patriot radars. In addition, we already know that drones are more than capable of destroying Patriot radars. They destroyed THAAD radars very early in the Gulf War of 2026 in Southwest Asia. Literally within the first day, all of the long-range ballistic missile defense radars were destroyed by Iran.
The Patriot radars are somewhat more difficult to destroy — not because they're defendable, but because they're a little harder to find since they're a little more mobile. But what I mean by "a little more mobile" is that they're not easy to hide. These things are radiating very large amounts of radio signal. And drones can be modified to home on radio signals, along with other techniques. So between satellite reconnaissance, electronic reconnaissance, and drones — which can even be networked — you can have a swarm of drones coming with artificial intelligence internet links between them. When one surveillance drone sees a Patriot defense unit, they should immediately be able to locate the radar, and then the radar has to defend itself against tens or hundreds of drones.
So I'm not sure that Patriot units will be survivable in the future. The S-300, S-400, and S-500 are somewhat different systems — I haven't had a chance to study them in detail, and they may have a similar poor future. But in the case of the S-300 to S-500, those systems do not depend on a single high-performance radar to function. They use multiple radars. So taking them out requires the destruction of multiple radars. Each of the radars that are destroyed are expensive, but they're not essentially irreplaceable the way the Patriot radar units are. The Patriot radars probably cost $200 or $300 million. So it's not like you lose a $10 million ancillary radar and you have a backup radar you can bring online. The Patriot is the worst possible design relative to the S-300 to S-500 system.
So I think we could be looking at a future situation where the Patriot radars are no longer viable for defense. Now, this is not minor, because the Patriot radars pose an absolutely overwhelming threat to aircraft. An enemy air force can essentially be kept out of the defense area of a Patriot defense unit because the Patriot interceptors have such a high intercept rate against airplanes — simply because airplanes are going so much more slowly, and any damage you do to an airplane causes its destruction. So the Patriots probably do have a 90 to near-100% intercept rate against airplanes.
So if you have a Patriot defense unit defending Kyiv, it's not possible for the Russian air force to just come into Kyiv and bomb the place at will. But of course, if the Patriot unit can be destroyed by drones and ballistic missiles, then air power becomes completely dominant and you can use it at your will. You can use these FAB 3,000-kilogram wire-guided bombs that have precision delivery of five or ten meters. You're talking about a hellish situation for ground troops if you have an adversary who can keep their air force in the air relative to you. And unless you have an air force that can take them on directly, you won't be able to do it with ground-based defenses.
It seems to me that's not a minor change in the military landscape. I don't know this is true at this point, but I think this is possibly what we're facing in the future. Patriot may have to be abandoned for a completely different kind of distributed air defense system — one with multiple, much less capable radars — so that you can afford to lose some of these radars and still have a viable air defense. I don't know what the solution is going to be, but it's not going to be easy. And I don't think the future is going to continue to have Patriot as a military solution in the long term. Probably not even in the near term. So this is a significant military development from what I can tell.
The role of perception — Israel, Iron Dome, and regional deterrence
Glenn Diesen: Perceptions are important too. For the US and Israel, which have been seen in the region as all-powerful, part of this image has of course been upheld by the Israeli Iron Dome — the assumption that it had complete and total efficiency, that nothing could possibly hit any target in Israel. This has been quite important for countries taking this into account when they view to what extent they could engage in a conflict with the Israelis. So again, the perceptions are important now that this is beginning to crack. It seems as if warfare will be impacted greatly in that part of the world.
Iranian countermeasures — maneuvering warheads, submunitions, and decoys
Theodore Postol: Now, another problem I haven't even begun to discuss here — and I can briefly touch on it if we have enough time — is countermeasures. What we see in the videos are warheads that are just falling. They're not evading. I showed some evading warheads, but those weren't the warheads where we saw intercepts. The warheads we saw intercepts against were simply ballistically falling warheads. They were not warheads that had rocket motors pushing them along, like the Alpha warhead. Those warheads are very unlikely to be interceptable by the Patriot PAC-3, because you need to have an estimate of where it's going to be possible to make an intercept — it takes time for the interceptor to get to a location where you can then make minor adjustments to hit the target. With a rocket motor accelerating the incoming warhead, you don't know where that location is, because the rocket motor can change its thrust and cause the warhead to maneuver.
So if we go back and just show you a few examples of countermeasures that are already demonstrated — we're not talking about theoretical stuff at this point. I've been talking about this for years, and every time I talk about it, the critique is, "Oh, we haven't seen this." My argument at the time was: well, you have no reason to see it, because you already can't intercept the ballistic targets, so why would I spend any time building a countermeasure? But now the Iranians have decided that they want to build countermeasures.
So here is the rocket-propelled Alpha warhead. Here's a better view of it showing its size. The rocket motor is back here. The warhead is up in front. That's easily a one-ton warhead, so that's going to do a lot of damage. And in the case of the Alpha, the rocket motor causes the warhead to maintain a very high speed while it's re-entering the atmosphere. So it hits the ground at maybe three or more kilometers per second. At three kilometers per second, if this warhead had no explosives in it at all, it would have the explosive power of its entire weight in high explosives — because it hits the ground so fast that the kinetic energy released is the equivalent of its weight in TNT and other high explosives. So this has got double the effect. This is like a two or two-and-a-half or three-ton warhead hitting the ground, which is why we saw the shock wave associated with the ground explosion with the Alpha — because this thing hit the ground at such a high speed that when its high explosives detonated, it was already carrying kinetic energy equal to the high explosives in terms of destructive force. So the damaging ability of this particular warhead is tremendously higher, and it's even harder to intercept.
If we look at all these ballistic missiles of different kinds, notice that all the warheads have winglets on them. And if you have winglets, what you can do is cause the warheads to maneuver by just maneuvering the winglets. So here's a maneuvering warhead. There's no way a Patriot PAC-3 is going to hit that. It has a 2 or 3% intercept rate against a target that's not maneuvering and is predictable in its motion.
Here's the same thing — this is a Sejjil warhead. You can see it's powered. This denser stream you see here is the second stage of the Sejjil. And this is the Sejjil warhead. Its plume is very broad because it's at very high altitudes, and there's no atmosphere around it to contain the plume into a narrow contrail.
Here again are the submunitions. You can't intercept submunitions — you just don't have enough missiles to intercept the submunitions. And here, for example, is a mockup shown in an Iranian facility that's open to the public. This is like a 150mm artillery shell, and we saw those things being deployed on a bigger warhead than this. This is a small warhead — just an example of the submunitions. There are small sub-units. This is not a unique warhead. So you either have a big warhead carrying hundreds or even thousands of these smaller anti-personnel warheads, or tens or scores of the equivalent of 155mm artillery shells. These are the countermeasures.
This is an example of one of these basic artillery shells. You can see evidence of a fold-out wing, and the utility of the fold-out wing is that it causes the warhead to point downward aerodynamically. So when the warhead hits the ground, the fragments generated by the warhead are spread near the surface of the ground — they're not oriented in an inefficient killing way. This is a very efficient way to cause lots of damage to people on the ground.
Here's another example — this is an Iskander ballistic missile. And you notice on the back here you have these vents. It turns out these vents carry decoys. These are decoys that are deployed from those vents. The decoys have electronic circuits in them, and they mimic the appearance of a warhead. So when you have one of these Iskanders come in, first of all, the Iskander can maneuver, so it can defeat the interceptor even if the interceptor manages to figure out where the warhead is — because the warhead probably has a jammer on it, a radio jammer, but it's also got all these other electronic jammers coming along with it. So you have no chance at all to defeat the system anyway.
Final assessment — the end of effective air defense
So the situation is such that between the drones and the ballistic missiles, air defenses are going to play no role in the future. And as long as you can build very inexpensive drones that are highly accurate and homing, and very inexpensive ballistic missiles with large warheads, you're in deep trouble.
We know that Netanyahu told Trump that he's more worried about the Iranian ballistic missiles than the nuclear weapons. We have him on record for that. And he should be, because Iran does not need to use nuclear weapons to really destroy Israel's ability to fight and to support an economy. That's what they're looking at now. If this war starts up again in a serious way and the Iranians start going at Israel again with ballistic missiles, there will be no defense. They can claim all they want, but the evidence is clear. The evidence is unambiguous that these air defense systems have no capability against ballistic missiles or drones.
Glenn Diesen: Ted, thank you so much for sharing your insights and the slides here. I think most people started realizing that the interceptor missiles have had their efficiency oversold — when all the damages were essentially prohibited from being reported on, and well later on this has come to light. Thank you very much.
Theodore Postol: And remember one other point: if those ballistic missiles are nuclear-armed, God help us, because the defenses will be able to do nothing to stop them. And that's true of the strategic systems as well, which is another discussion. So anyone who thinks that these ballistic missile defenses — whether they're strategic or tactical — can play any role in defending you from the mortal consequences of either mass conventional attacks or nuclear attacks is really courting an existential disaster. This is really important for people to understand.