I think a highly volatile and chaotic use case is exactly where I'd expect them to design a perfect, or at least orders of magnitude less susceptible to operato

I think a highly volatile and chaotic use case is exactly where I'd expect them to design a perfect, or at least orders of magnitude less susceptible to operator error, system. Of course it's hard for me, a spoiled millennial who got into programming via online games, to imagine what war computers were capable of in 1988, but as described in the thread, this scenario sounds so utterly routine that I am surprised that it basically involved a game of telephone to confirm basic facts about a plane. "A tracked entity gets confused with another tracked entity" or "an entity's status of hostile-or-not gets lost" sounds like exactly the cases that should be impossible to get wrong as a fundamental goal of this kind of operation.