On July 3, 1988, during the waning days of the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes was patrolling the Persian Gulf to protect shipping when it fired on an Iranian aircraft. As immediately became clear, the plane that the Vincennes had shot down was not a military craft, but instead a civilian airliner. Iran Air Flight 655 was on a short hop to Dubai when it was struck, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard.

Predictably, the incident further soured the already-poor relations between the United States and Iran, with the Iranian government claiming the strike was a deliberate massacre of civilians. Internal U.S. investigations did not concur, though the Navy did come under significant public criticism. Why had a targeting system as allegedly sophisticated as that aboard the V

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