PS It didn't cost the USA a penny in fact it just increased business a tiny bit for Ratheon the US supplier. It was not the US that shot down a low cost drone with a Patriot missle ----it was one of the 13 allies that have Patriot systems purchased from the US + by contrast the Patriot system has been rigorously tested more than 2,500 times with US Army oversight under real-world conditions.
Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), states that this isn’t the first time a Patriot missile was used to shoot down a drone. The main takeaway, Karako says, is that the growing threat of drones will pose greater threats to alliance air defense systems than what was heard of in the past.
“You can’t really blame the Middle Eastern actor who probably took a shot at this,” he said. “When something pops up on their screen as a radar blip, they may not know that it costs $200 from Amazon. It may just show up as a radar blip. So what this really points to is the lack of sufficiently precise surveillance that informs the air defense mission. Now, if that was an aircraft rather than a drone, an air defense missile may be appropriate. But the difficulty is you don’t always know. It could be a cruise missile, could be a slow-moving aircraft. What this points to is a need for better sensors that know what the threat is.”
Raytheon says: "Raytheon's Global Patriot Solutions provide 13 countries, including five NATO nations around the globe, with a combat proven missile defense architecture that is continuously upgraded to keep ahead of evolving threats."
Looks like better sensors that better identify a threat has become a needed upgrade. Is common these days for terrorist groups like ISIS to use low cost drones with M40 grenades at a enemy so...anti-drone countermeasures need to be employed.
