Its interesting that FM 44-85 "Patriot Battalion and Battery Operations" is publicly available and pretty easy to find. We discussed this in a systems analysis class back in '04 using a copy of FM 44-85 released in '97. In summary the class blamed TRADOC and the tech writers for publishing a manual that did not accurately reflect real world use cases, with the software bug being a secondary concern.

I googled up a copy of FM 44-85 to refresh my memory and write this post, its pretty much as I remember it.

The doctrine in chapter 3, planning, is extreme mobility and rapid hour to hour activation and deactivation of individual missile batteries, kinda like infantry bounding overwatch but glacially slower on an hourly basis, for example see Table 3-2 where the four batteries are rotating on and off and moving/maintaining on detailed hour by hour basis, so the doctrine seems to be uptimes should typically be on the order of 3 or 4 hours maybe. Not a zillion days in a row as actually deployed when the software bug hit.

The doctrine in chapter 5, operations, goes into a big discussion of defense design strategies. The weapon system is inherently sectorized this naturally leads to overlapping areas of fire being very important. You have to ask why the unit that had a ridiculous uptime never shut down to perform daily maintenance which would inherently involve rebooting stuff, its no big deal to down a system because sectorization and overlap is inherently built into the technology. Its reasonably well understood that technically you can tell an individual infantry soldier to guard a post for 100 hours or 1000 hours continuously, but someone screwed up if they issued an order like that because its simply impractical. That leadership failure will be discussed later. So... aside from the question of why the software failed under ridiculous conditions, you have to ask WHO more or less knowingly misapplied the resource without backup or planned maintenance intervals? Possibly this section of the FM was rewritten between the tragedy and the the release of the copy I have access to, but its still poorly written. Or what section of the FM would have ever given the officers the idea that the weapons system can be deployed the way they did it? The idea that the weapon system could do what they told it to do came from somewhere and it apparently was not the documentation?

The doctrine in chapter 6, support, has a little blurb about battalion level staff officers. What did the EMMO think about keeping a patriot booted up and running for 100 hours without a maintenance interval? Missile maintenance is literally his only job. And if that slot was unfilled, its the job of S4 and the XO to cover or reassign someone or otherwise work around. Around page 6-16 there's a discussion about operators being responsible for maintenance... I had a humvee assigned to me, I hated it, it leaked oil all the time, but the point is even my junky humvee had daily maintenance tasks for PMCS. The patriot missile PMCS checklist is probably classified, but if a lowly humvee has daily maint, how can a missile not have a much longer and more complicated daily maint? And this implies someone is pencil whipping maint (I mean, everyone kinda does that, but..)

Its hard to summarize a class discussion but from the point of view of a systems analysis class, mostly non-military other than myself, the end users were being innovative and adapting and overcoming which unfortunately means the doctrine and specifications of the weapon system have little to do with how its being used. The class considered this the biggest systems analysis mistake of the tragedy. Why even write docs and specs if the users won't read them and they have no relation to what the users want to do? I guess a good HN analogy would be you could creatively deploy binary executables using the "cat" command and hand typing unicode and that would be a nifty hack to work around a problem but would be a pretty stupid way to operate normally. Specifically the Army's own docs used to train and plan operations imply shorter operations terms interspersed with maintenance intervals and deep redundancy, none of which seems to have anything to do with the failed deployment.

There was a big argument in class that it had nothing to do with systems analysis and was merely a leadership failure, using the example above of technically you can order a soldier to stand guard for a hundred hours, when guard shifts are normally a couple hours, and when he passes out asleep around 48 hours into his shift, you can try to blame the soldier or declare there's a bug in our brain preventing 100 hour deployments, or you can even blame the manual and the technical writers for not putting a warning in the manual not to do dumb things, but fundamentally thats just passing the buck that it was a failure of leadership to assign a unit to a task its not designed to handle, then cover it up by pretending its merely a software bug or something. I don't know enough history of the tragedy; its possible the Army correctly relieved some officers of command and its only the media and press who blame the software bug.

You can imagine the look on the face of the software developers when they got the bug report; like dude, did you ever read FM 44-85, or if you aren't reading it, what are you reading, so we can read it?