MIM-23 Hawk
1960s surface-to-air missile family by Raytheon
The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK ("Homing All the Way Killer") is an American medium-range surface-to-air missile. It was designed to be a much more mobile counterpart to the MIM-14 Nike Hercules, trading off range and altitude capability for a much smaller size and weight. Its low-level performance was greatly improved over Nike through the adoption of new radars and a continuous wave semi-active radar homing guidance system. It entered service with the US Army in 1959.
In 1971, it underwent a major improvement program as the Improved Hawk, or I-Hawk, which made several improvements to the missile and replaced all of the radar systems with new models. Improvements continued throughout the next twenty years, adding improved ECCM, a potential home-on-jam feature, and in 1995, a new warhead that made it capable against short-range tactical ballistic missiles. Jane's reported that the original system's single shot kill probability was 0.56; I-Hawk improved this to 0.85.
Hawk was superseded by the MIM-104 Patriot in US Army service by 1994. The last US user was the US Marine Corps, who used theirs until 2002 when they were replaced with the man-portable short-range FIM-92 Stinger. The missile was also produced outside the US in Western Europe, Japan and Iran.
The public source identifies “MIM-23 Hawk” as 1960s surface-to-air missile family by Raytheon. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around MIM-23, Hawk and 1960s.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q482414. The Library of Congress control number is sh85059385. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1971, 1995 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “MIM-23 Hawk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.