See, there've been guided missiles since the 1950s. There'll be 60-something old geezers at Raytheon who have done missiles their whole careers, 30-40 years, and they would have been apprenticed to the previous generation of old geezers who had merely done missiles most of their careers. These guys should know this stuff by now.
Fatal errors are almost never a single thing going wrong unpredictably - they're a chain of events leading to an inexorable conclusion. Root cause - where were these guys?
The problem is, they never had to deal with software engineering; my mom, who served in the Israeli Navy in the late 70s, told me horror stories about the ship-to-ship guided missiles they dealt with. They were essentially analog electronics - addition done by adding voltages, for example - with error creeping in at every component. The way I remember her telling it, something like 30% to 60% of the things were down at any given time because some analog multiplier or adder had an error that was just a little bit too large. No one in the field was even thinking about software bugs at that point.
The reliable (and programmable) digital electronics were originally developed for ICBMs in the 60s, and only after quite a bit of miniaturization were they available for smaller guided missiles, meaning that there wasn't quite as much institutional experience of software engineering among guided missile designers as you'd think.
The SCUD was doing a much easier job, though. And the amount the patriot missed by is actually pretty close to the accuracy of a SCUD at hitting its target.
The SCUD was developed in mid-1950s using technology pioneered in 1940s. Back then, the only feasible electronics were based on vacuum tubes. Noir films were hip, chrome fins on the cars were just in, ball joints in suspensions were about to appear, and it was socially acceptable to call black man a negro.
I think it did amazing job in the 90s against the arguably most technically advanced and innovative military, even more so considering it was pushed past its original specs.
They did get it right; the specs for the Patriot system allowed for rebooting every couple of days specifically to avoid this problem.
To my eyes, this is a classic training issue. Either the men on the ground were never told to reboot, or they were never told the consequences of failing to do so. Whether that failure was on the manufacturer's part for making crap manuals, or on the Army's part for screwing up the training, I don't know.
Fatal errors are almost never a single thing going wrong unpredictably - they're a chain of events leading to an inexorable conclusion. Root cause - where were these guys?
It is possible to get this right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dart_missile#Gulf_War_.2819...