I tend to agree with violentnuke on this one: -"90% of patriots did hit their targets but did not destroy it. Only 10% of scuds were effectively destroyed, and about 50%+ of them were taken off their intended target. " Regardless of what the AARs stated the missiles achieved in GW1, those of us watching the repeated broadcasts of Iraqi SCUDs falling on targets saw that even though the Patriots put off a pretty shower of sparks in the night sky, there were several instances that the warheads survived intact, and were nothing more than knocked off course and landed and exploded elsewhere. When your missile has a CEP somewhere in an area the size of a city block, knocking it off course to crash into another neighborhood or other city block is not any proof the Patriots effectively countered the SCUD threat. What would've happened had any one of those warheads been chemical or nuclear? It should be obvious: they still would've survived to detonate, just a but further from their intended targets, but still deadly just the same. That's nothing to brag about for the Patriot's "success". A successful intercept should imply, "hey, we stopped the missile from delivering its warhead." Patriots didn't always do that, merely so much as knocking it off course and making it land and explode somewhere else. One of the arguments was that, as SCUDs were in their terminal diving phase, they were aerodynamically/structurally weak and broke up, and the Patriot radars couldn't discern missile parts from the actual warhead. So are we now to believe that hit-to-kill has improved those odds any? What's the point if the piece we're hitting isn't even the warhead we originally were trying to stop?