[jandrese]

It should be noted that the Patriot was being used outside of its original design goal when tasked with shooting down missiles. It was designed to shoot down Soviet interceptors, but had to pivot when the Soviet Union collapsed. Missiles were a stretch goal of the original project, but ended up being its primary mission.

[jvanderbot]

And in particular, many of the failures were from lack of proper operation, such as keeping the system on far too long, causing timer overflows.

https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, one last point on this subthread is, the modern Patriot system is also not at all the same beast, with a lot of upgrades in the decades since.