Between the Feb 11 Israeli warning and the fatal Feb 25 engagement, GAO records a Feb 16 software fix and a Feb 21 warning message, neither specifying a safe run-time limit

patriot-missilegao-reportgulf-warinstitutional-failurehuman-factorsmilitary-engineeringtimekeeping

claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-known-bug-patch-arrived-one-day-late records the two endpoints of the Dhahran timeline: the February 11, 1991 Israeli warning and the corrected software's arrival on February 26, one day after the fatal strike. GAO's own text names two further dated events in between that neither endpoint carries. A corrected software version was released on February 16: "This change allowed for extended run times and was included in the modified software version that was released on February 16, 1991. However, Army officials did not use the Israeli data to determine how long the Patriot could operate before the inaccurate time calculation would render the system ineffective." Five days later, on February 21, the Patriot Project Office sent a general warning to all users — quoted above — that named the symptom but not the threshold.

The gap the two events leave is specific: a fix existed nine days before the strike, and a warning went to every unit four days before it, but neither said how long was too long. A battery that had simply kept running through a wartime alert — the operating condition GAO says the corrected February 16 software was not paired with usable guidance for — had no way to know it had crossed into danger. This also supplies operational context for why the fix took as long as it did to reach every unit: GAO records that "during the conflict the Patriot's software was modified six times," and that Patriots "had to be shut down for at least 1 to 2 hours to install each software modification" — the February 16 release was one of six such disruptive updates competing for the same wartime logistics chain that claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-known-bug-patch-arrived-one-day-late already documents as the fatal bottleneck.