HAWK Air Defense Equipment

About HAWK Air Defense Equipment:

• HAWK, short for ‘Homing All the Way Killer’, entered service with the US Army in 1959, during the Vietnam War.
• It is a mobile air defense 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 modernization: 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.
• US forces largely stopped using HAWK from the early years of the new century.

Source : Indian Express