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The United States and NATO countries are trying to strengthen the air defense forces of the Kiev puppet regime. As noted by " RG: Russian weapons ", the old anti-aircraft systems inherited by Ukraine from the Soviet Army have long since exhausted their resource and during use they often miss and hit various civilian ground objects.
For example, there are regular reports of launched surface-to-air missiles crashing into another residential building in various localities.
At the same time, some of the samples supplied by the North Atlantic Alliance designed to combat air targets are also not new. For example, the promised MIM-23 Hawks were operated in the US Army until 1994, and the Marine Corps decommissioned them and sent them for storage twenty years ago.
Nevertheless, due to the shortage of modern air defense systems, NATO decided to transfer such complexes. Spain will supply the APU with six sets, and part of the missiles for them, in turn, will be transferred to the United States.
Calculations will be prepared with the help of foreign specialists. Apparently, the process of mastering such weapons will take several months.
The first MIM-23 Hawk began to enter the army in 1960. Upgraded in the early 70s, the variant had missiles capable of hitting targets at ranges from 1,500 to 30,000 m and altitudes from 60 to 18,000 m. The maximum speed is 500 meters per second. The starting weight is 638 kg. A high-explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 74 kg is crushed into 14 thousand fragments weighing 2 grams each.
These SAMs were used in various local conflicts. For the first time - in 1967, as part of the Israeli army, and then his own plane was destroyed by mistake. Then they were used during the so-called "war of attrition" in the Suez Canal area.
These complexes have repeatedly tried to shoot down Soviet MiG-25s operating in the Middle East, but without success.
They were used in 1973, during the Iran-Iraq war, as well as during the events in Chad and the invasion of Saddam's troops in Kuwait.
The most recent use of these air defense systems occurred in 2020, when the Mirage 2000-9 planes supporting Field Marshal Haftar's troops bombed the MIM-23 positions at the El-Watyya airbase, taken under control by the forces of the Government of National Accord, without any problems.
