re: Russia Fires "Miss"les at Syrian Targets...Hits Iran (ooops.)

This sort of thing would sometimes happen to early generation versions of our Tomahawk missiles too.

Those weapons used inertial guidance and terrain mapping to find their target and sometimes they'd just plain old, straight out miss a turn. In an amusing twist, during the first gulf war several times they missed a turn because their maps used a building as a waypoint, but said building no longer existed because we'd blown it flat in earlier attacks. The integration of GPS has greatly lessened the chance of this sort of thing happening.

As far as Russian operations in Syria, I hope they keep shooting away. They've been able to gather real world operational intelligence and performance data on our weapons systems for more than a decade now. I really appreciate that they're now returning the favor.