MIM-23 Hawk - History

History

• August 1962 agreement in principle was reached between the US and Israeli governments for the sale of Hawk missiles to Israel.
• October - November 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis necessitates a request for a total of 304 missiles to be delivered at an average turnaround of 3 days per missile.
• February - March 1965 the United States Marine Corps gets interested in the Hawk, placing them at Da Nang and Hill 327, which was west of Da Nang airbase. This was both the first USMC deployment of the Hawk, and also the first deployment of the Hawk in Vietnam.
• March 1965 the first Hawk battalion was deployed to Israel.
• June 5, 1967 In an unusual incident an Israeli MIM-23A shot down a damaged Israeli Dassault MD.450 Ouragan that was in danger of crashing into the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, the first combat firing of the Hawk, the first combat kill attributed to the Hawk system .
• March 21, 1969 Before noon, a new Hawk battery, which was deployed at Baluza, north of the town of Kantara in the Sinai region detected an Egyptian MiG-21 aircraft which took off from Port-said airport. The controller, Yair Tamir, tracked the aircraft on the radar, in its flight from north to south along the Suez canal, and when the MiG-21 broke to a course heading towards the Hawk battery, a missile was launched at it, which successfully destroyed the aircraft while it was flying at an altitude of 6,700 m. . During the War of Attrition, Hawk batteries had shot down between 8 and 12 aircraft ; Janes reports 12 kills as 1 Il-28, 4 Su-7, 4 MiG-17 and 3 MiG-21.
• May 1972, Improved Hawk support equipment was first deployed to Germany.
• October 1973 Yom Kippur war 75 Israeli missiles were fired downing between 12 and 24 aircraft and one oil well on fire in Abu-Rodes oil field.
• 1977 Conversion of Basic Hawk to Improved Hawk was completed by all US Army units in Europe and Korea by the end of the year.
• 1980s
  • Kuwait, 1 kill of an Iranian F-5 during the Iran-Iraq War.
  • Iran, at least 40 Iraqi aircraft destroyed during the Iran-Iraq War.
• March 1985 DA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) approved the development of an anti-tactical missile (ATM) mission for Hawk.
• February 12, 1986, 9 Iraqi aircraft downed by a Hawk site near al-Faw in southern Iraq during Operation Dawn 8. Among the aircraft, are Su-22 and MiG-23s.
• September 7, 1987, French Army, 403nd Air Defence Regiment, in Chad, shot down a Libyan Tu-22B on a bombing mission with an MIM-23B during the Chadian-Libyan war. The particularity of this event is with its geographical situation, a few miles from a border. The attack began outside the Chadian territory proper and left the French with only a very small window of opportunity to shoot the intruder. The interception took place almost at the vertical of the battery. Debris and unexploded bombs from the Tu-22 rained over the position and injured no one.
• August 2, 1990, Hawk missiles defending Kuwait against the Iraqi invasion in August 1990 are claimed to have shot down up to 14 Iraqi aircraft. Only two kills have been verified a MiG-23BN and a Su-22. Iraqi forces captured four or five Kuwaiti Hawk batteries.
• November 1990, Task Force Scorpion, a U.S. Army Hawk-Patriot electronic task force, becomes operational and assumes the air defense mission for Desert Shield units forming up in Saudi Arabia.
• February 1991, Bravo Battery, 2-1 ADA moves into Iraq and establishes Hawk missile sites near as-Salman.
• A SAFE AIR demonstration was conducted at WSMR to display the effectiveness and versatility of several existing and new United States Army weapon systems in providing air and surface defense. Emphasis was placed on defeating cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The Hawk system successfully engaged two surrogate cruise missiles, one UAV, and one fixed wing drone.
• The United States Marine Corps successfully tested its Hawk Mobility and theater missile defense (TMD) software upgrades at White Sands Missile Range. Hawk acquired the three LANCE targets, two of which were successfully engaged and destroyed. This was the first time the entire USMC ATBM system had been tested.