In the first 1990 Gulf War, for example, the performance of US Patriot missiles in shooting down Iraqi Scud missiles fired at Israel, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait was lauded by Western powers and the media. A 95% success rate was claimed at the time, with then President George Bush claiming that the Patriot’s record was “near perfect”. Over the following year however, the US Army lowered this estimate to 79% over Saudi Arabian skies and 40% over Israel. A later report by the General Accounting Office concluded that Patriot missiles destroyed only 9% of the Scuds they attempted to engage. The Israeli Defense Force calculated the hit rate at just 2%.

On the night of Jan. 25, 1991 in Tel Aviv, three Patriots that were fired into the air fell back to earth and exploded. Two of them hit residential areas and the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv reported at the time that one Israeli was killed, 44 were wounded, and 4,156 apartments were destroyed. That incident and a few others like it led Ted Postol, an MIT weapons scientist, to testify before a congressional committee that, “it is possible that if we had not attempted to defend against Scuds, the level of resulting damage would be no worse than actually occurred.”

In a documentary aired on Israeli television in 1993, Moshe Arens, who was Israel’s Defense Minister in the Gulf War, Gen. Dan Shomron, who was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force during the war, and Haim Asa, a member of an Israeli technical team that worked with Patriots during the war, all dismissed the Patriot anti-missile system. General Shomron described accounts of the Patriot’s success as “a myth.” Mr. Asa called them “a joke.” All concurred with a 1991 report by the Israeli Air Force, which concluded that “there is no evidence of even a single successful intercept” although there is “circumstantial evidence for one possible intercept.”

The point being, the US has a track record of lying about the effectiveness of its missiles.