HAWK air defence equipment.

• 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 interceptor missiles would be an upgrade to the Stinger missile system, which is a smaller, shorter-range air defence system.
• The US sent the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft Stingers to Ukraine early on in the war, and then placed orders for more stocks of the missiles with Raytheon Technologies Corp. after they demonstrated great success in stopping Russian air assaults.
• The US would likely initially send interceptor missiles for the HAWK system to Ukraine because it was unclear if enough US launchers — in storage for decades — were in good repair.

About HAWK:

• HAWK, short for ‘Homing All the Way Killer’, 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.