In news– The United States is considering retrieving older HAWK air defence equipment from storage to send to Ukraine which is facing a heavy barrage of Russian drone-fired and cruise missiles.
The HAWK equipment-
- HAWK, short for ‘Homing All the Way Killer’, is an American medium-range surface-to-air missile.
- It was designed to be a much more mobile counterpart to the MIM-14 Nike Hercules, trading off range and altitude capability for a much smaller size and weight.
- Its low-level performance was greatly improved over Nike through the adoption of new radars and a continuous wave semi-active radar homing guidance system.
- It entered service with the US Army in 1959, during the Vietnam war.
- It underwent upgrades over the decades that followed, including a major one in 1971 that produced the so-called I-HAWK (or improved HAWK), with a kill probability of 85%.
- The HAWK system was the predecessor to the PATRIOT missile defence system that Raytheon built in the 1990s.
- US forces largely stopped using HAWK from the early years of the new century. PATRIOT remains off the table for Ukraine.
- Hawk was superseded by the MIM-104 Patriot in US Army service by 1994.
- The last US user was the US Marine Corps, who used theirs until 2002 when they were replaced with the man-portable short-range FIM-92 Stinger.
- The missile was also produced outside the US in Western Europe, Japan and Iran. The US never used the Hawk in combat, but it has been employed numerous times by other nations.
Source: The Indian Express
