In 2003, No One Hated U.S. Army Patriot Missiles More than U.S. Air Force Pilots - The National Interest
Here’s What You Need to Know: Studying the Patriots-versus-friendly jets conflict after the invasion, the U.S. Defense Science Board expressed deep worry. During the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and allied forces, U.S. Army Patriot air-defense missile batteries were so dangerously unreliable—and prone to firing on friendly planes—that they provoked a brief, and today largely forgotten, civil war between missileers and fighter pilots. “Many allied pilots believed that the Patriot posed a greater threat to them than did any [surface-to-air missile] in Iraq’s inventory,” Benjamin Lambeth wrote in his exhaustive Iraq war monograph The Unseen War. “The Patriots scared the Hell out of us,” one F-16 pilot remarked. As Army missiles downed two allied warplanes, killing three crewmen, fliers did their best to avoid the trigger-happy Patriot batteries—and in one case an Air Force pilot actually fired on a Patriot crew. When American and coalition armored battalions swept into Iraq in Mar