GAO independently re-derived the Patriot time-conversion fix rather than merely relaying the Army's account

patriot-missilegao-reportgulf-warsource-verificationmilitary-engineering

GAO/IMTEC-92-26 — the primary source behind claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-clock-drift-from-24-bit-truncation-of-tenths and claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-known-bug-patch-arrived-one-day-late — was compiled over a stated review period of "June 1991 to January 1992." Within that period, GAO's own investigators did not simply summarize the Army's account of the bug and its fix: they independently re-derived the fix by "performing the key calculations needed to account for longer run times," and separately participated in an intercept simulation at the Patriot Software Test Facility in Huntsville, Alabama — a step the report frames as familiarization ("to become more knowledgeable about how the Patriot system performed in an operational environment"), not as a test of the fix itself. The report's named contributors — Michael Blair (Assistant Director), Sally Obenski (Evaluator-in-Charge), and Paula Bridickas (Computer Scientist) — are credited as the analysts who did this work, distinct from Ralph V. Carlone, the GAO Assistant Comptroller General who signed the report to Rep. Howard Wolpe, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight that requested it.

This bears on how much weight the report's other claims can carry. The 24-bit truncation mechanism and the Appendix II drift figures are not GAO relaying an Army self-report; they are GAO's own arithmetic, checked against the Army's account rather than copied from it. It is the same evidentiary posture — an independent auditor re-deriving a technical claim rather than accepting an institution's account of its own system — that recurs across the vault's other GAO-Patriot cluster in claim-gao-nsiad-92-340-patriot-9-percent-strong-evidence-standard, where GAO again applied its own standard rather than the Army's.