U.S. Patriot units declined to use external data recorders fearing shutdown; Israeli units used theirs and supplied the data that diagnosed the Dhahran clock-drift bug

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The February 11, 1991 Israeli warning behind claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-known-bug-patch-arrived-one-day-late did not arrive because U.S. Patriot batteries had detected the range-gate drift themselves. GAO's report states that U.S. commanders declined to use available external data recorders on their own systems "because they believed the recorders could cause an unanticipated system shutdown." Israeli commanders operating Patriot units made the opposite choice, used their recorders, and supplied the resulting data to the U.S. Army — the same 20-percent-shift-at-8-hours reading that reached the Patriot Project Office and set the Appendix II timeline documented in claim-patriot-dhahran-1991-time-drift-proportional-to-runtime-appendix-ii-table in motion.

The diagnosis of the bug that killed 28 U.S. soldiers therefore did not originate inside the U.S. chain of custody for the affected system. It came from an allied operator willing to accept a monitoring risk the American units declined to take on their own equipment. This sits alongside claim-army-tsm-spreadsheet-and-brl-survey-flaws-undermined-patriot-kill-claims as a second instance in the same GAO-documented cluster where the Army's own instrumentation and evidentiary practices — not the underlying weapon system's physics — are the object under scrutiny.