Lewis and Postol's 1991–93 analysis of news-camera footage found no unambiguous evidence Patriot destroyed even one Scud warhead

During and after the 1991 Gulf War, MIT researchers George N. Lewis and Theodore A. Postol obtained unedited news-camera footage of Patriot–Scud engagements over Israel and Saudi Arabia and analyzed the flight geometry frame by frame, treating the public video record as physical evidence rather than accepting the U.S. Army's success statistics. Their conclusion, published in Science & Global Security (1993), was flatly negative: "The videos we have been able to obtain contain no unambiguous evidence that Patriot destroyed even one Scud warhead."

The finding was epistemically aggressive because it did not depend on classified data or on the Army's own after-action reports — the two sources whose credibility was in question. Instead it rested on imagery anyone could obtain, interpreted through the physics of an interceptor–warhead intercept: a genuine warhead kill should leave a signature (a change in the warhead's trajectory or a visible destruction event) that the footage did not show. Where the Army read a successful engagement, Lewis and Postol saw only that a Patriot and a Scud had passed near each other.

This is the independent-video leg of a broader challenge to the program's credibility; the Army's own claimed effectiveness also collapsed under review, treated separately in claim-patriot-army-effectiveness-claim-collapsed-from-96-to-52-percent. The engagements the footage covers were the same class of event whose underlying failures the vault documents at the battery level — the clock-drift bug of claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-clock-drift-from-24-bit-truncation-of-tenths and the Al Hussein Scud's unstable reentry breakup. The method itself — public data plus first-principles physics used to contest an official military claim — is the same one MIT would apply 35 years later to a classified Russian weapon, a parallel drawn out in claim-mit-open-source-physics-contested-official-military-claims-patriot-and-burevestnik and claim-burevestnik-osint-constrained-to-direct-cycle-turbojet.