HAWK Air Defence Equipment

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

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.

HAWK after Stinger

• 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.
• 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.
• The Biden administration would use the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) to transfer the HAWK equipment, Reuters said. According to the US Department of State. 
• PDA allows for the “speedy delivery of defence articles and services from Department of Defence stocks to foreign countries and international organisations to respond to unforeseen emergencies”.
• Military assistance under PDA does not require Congressional approval, and could “begin arriving within days or even hours of approval.

The US has provided almost $17 billion worth of security assistance to Ukraine since the launch of Russia’s invasion on February 24.