GAO found the Army's Patriot kill claims rested on an internally inconsistent spreadsheet and a ground-damage survey covering only about a third of Saudi engagements

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GAO's April 1992 testimony explained why the Army Project Manager's assessment that Patriot "successfully engaged about 70 percent of the Scud missiles" (over 80 percent in Saudi Arabia, over 50 percent in Israel) — collapsed under review, and the explanation is a data-quality finding, not a dispute over interpretation. GAO examined "two reports cited as the basis for the assessment." The first, a large spreadsheet prepared by "the Army Training and Doctrine Command's System Manager for High-Medium Air Defense," was, per GAO, "actually an inaccurate summary of information obtained through telephone calls to various units in the Gulf, Army staff offices in the Pentagon, or the Patriot Project Office," with "many gaps and inconsistencies" between spreadsheet and supporting records — including "several instances in which Patriot operators reported destroying more Scud warheads than there were missiles launched," and cases where "there were no records supporting the spreadsheet entries." The System Manager himself "was not surprised" by the gaps: the spreadsheet "was not intended to be used as an analysis of Patriot's performance," only to keep the Air Defense School abreast of events.

The second document was a draft report by the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory on ground impact points. It "included information on only about one-third of the Saudi engagements, although the Project Manager's assessment cited it as a source for all engagements"; it "assumed that Patriot destroyed Scud warheads in the air unless warhead damage was found on the ground," an assumption GAO called improper "because some units did not attempt to locate damage"; and its site visits "were always made days or weeks after an impact when craters had often been filled and missile debris removed." The draft's errors were concrete: "the dates of two events were reversed, and a photograph purportedly depicting a Scud warhead disabled by Patriot actually pictured a Scud fuel tank."

This is the mechanism claim underlying claim-gao-nsiad-92-340-patriot-9-percent-strong-evidence-standard: the Army's own source records — a hand-compiled telephone-survey spreadsheet never meant to be an analysis, and a partial, delayed, still-draft ground-damage survey — could not support the volume of kills claimed, independent of any dispute about intercept physics. It complements the physical-evidence critique in claim-lewis-postol-1993-no-video-evidence-of-patriot-scud-warhead-kill with an audit-trail critique: even setting aside what the footage shows, the paperwork behind the Army's own count did not hold together.