Given that the performance of the Patriot missile was much over-hyped in the first Gulf war, should #3 be on there? Do we know that the missile would have intercepted the Scud if launched?
The Israeli army wrote a report about the error and a patch was uploaded into the US systems the day after the attack. Bad timing I guess. After day, the Patriots never missed their target and didn't need to be rebooted.
"e. Two weeks before the incident, Army officials received Israeli data indicating some loss in accuracy after the system had been running for 8 consecutive hours. Consequently, Army officials modified the software to improve the system's accuracy. However, the modified software did not reach Dhahran until February 26, 1991--the day after the Scud incident."
The article does offer a suggestion as to why the Patriot was so inaccurate. Hitting a missile means you need to get within a few meters of the target, and the conversion error would exceed that after just a few hours of operation. It also gives a plausible solution to how it escaped testing: The tests would likely have been run on freshly powered up systems.
