Hawk Air Defence

In News

• The United States (US) is considering retrieving older HAWK air defence equipment from storage to send to Ukraine.
  • The HAWK interceptor missiles would be an upgrade to the Stinger missile system, which is a smaller, shorter-range air defence system. 

HAWK

• HAWK, short for ‘Homing All the Way Killer’, 
• It entered service with the US Army in 1959, during the Vietnam war. 
• It is an American medium-range surface-to-air missile.
• 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. 

Source: IE