Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Patriot Missile Accidentally Fired?

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.

4 comments:

Donald said...

Accident my arse. I was in a Patriot unit in the early 90's. No way nohow.

rikyrah said...

You believe that, and I've got luxury condos in the Lower 9th Ward on New Orleans to sell you.

Anonymous said...

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.

Anonymous said...

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.