The United States is considering sending older HAWK air defence equipment from storage to Ukraine to help it defend against Russian drone and cruise missile attacks.
About HAWK –
HAWK, short for ‘Homing All the Way Killer’, entered service with the US Army in 1959, during the Vietnam War.
It is a mobileair defence system.
It is a 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 first versions of the system had a range of 25 km for aerial targets, and an altitude of 14 km. After modernisation: the maximum target interception range increased to 40 km with a maximum interception altitude of 18 km.
The HAWK system was the predecessor to the PATRIOT missile defence system that Raytheon built in the 1990s.
The U.S. forces largely stopped using HAWK from the early years of the new century.
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