As an Israeli who lived through the Gulf War and served in the army, I can attest that the patriot missile was a success and massive failure at the same time. I

As an Israeli who lived through the Gulf War and served in the army, I can attest that the patriot missile was a success and massive failure at the same time. It was better than nothing, let me just say that. The problem was that we knew it had issues, complained many times, but it was tied up in politics. We wanted to develop and deploy our own missile defence systems for a long time, but in many ways we were more or less blackmailed into spending the defence loans we receive to pay back the American defence establishment. The message was take what you are given and enrich private American companies, or else (btw for the haters, we must spend our "aid" with companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc., it does not go to anything else at all, so really it's your tax dollars shilling your military industry). Anyway, I saw first hand Patriot misses and the fear after that, especially regarding chemical weapons. A huge part of the country spent time with gas masks and plastic in safe rooms during the gulf war. At the end of the war, we felt like our leaders failed protecting us sufficiently, especially when they knew there were issues. The interesting outcome is this directly lead to various missile programs including kipat barzel, arrow, spider, and others. Before, missile defence was a much harder sell, but the aftermath of patriot failures raise the case that again as a country we had to be more self-sufficient regardless of the cost. The other reason of course is that the Americans never really had an offering that assessed needs such as short-range, low flying projectiles, rockets, shells, multiple-target tracking, etc. Today, we have arguably the most advanced short-range and tactical missile defence systems. All of these systems are built heavily on targeting/guidance and to run on cheap hardware that can fail massively. The interceptors and computers are not necessarily cost effective and super expensive, but much more practical. Additionally, redundancy in terms of overlap of targeting errors and misses is a heavy part of deployment. Resource-wise, it's not always possible, but I know first-hand it is a combination of various operational failures of the Patriot combined with years of relentless attacks by our enemies using anything from glorified flying garbage to old Soviet tech.