How in the Hell do you accidentally fire a Patriot Missile?
A whole series of events have to take place before firing... target acquisition, tracking, double checking/confirmation of a target...more tracking, launch order from commander(s), etc. It's not a one button operation. There are certainly fail-safes on the Patriot. So this story doesn't exactly make sense to me.
This reminds me of the reported Israeli bombing raid in Syria a few weeks ago. We didn't find out what happened until several days later.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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4 comments:
Accident my arse. I was in a Patriot unit in the early 90's. No way nohow.
You believe that, and I've got luxury condos in the Lower 9th Ward on New Orleans to sell you.
I was also in a Patriot unit in the early 90's and in Saudi twice. I can tell you that Patriots accidentally fired during the war. It occurred because the radar detected a "spurious" target and engaged automatically. The target never existed and it was a failure of the radar.
The result was that we took launchers off-line until a scud launch was detected. I would have tought they would have worked out those issues by now.
I'm sure no one cares anymore, but this was caused by a software bug that wasn't known to exist. The unit in question was using a new capability and was actually in a training scenario. When the crew "fired" a missile in the training scenario, a fire message was inadvertently sent to the launcher which resulted in a missile being fired.
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