Many of the English-language media in Tehran had difficulty transliterating the name “Hawk” and announced the weapon was called the “Hag” or the “Hog.”
StrategyPage, an American website on military issues, said of the test announcement: “Unlike most weapons announcements from Iran, this one was probably not mostly propaganda.”
It described the Hawk as 1950s technology, but said it was reliable and effective against targets lacking a lot of countermeasures. Iran bought the 1970 version, but further improvements were made by the United States after the revolution in the 80s and 90s.
StrategyPage said Iran had bought 150 launchers, and nearly a thousand missiles and other gear sufficient to equip 16 Hawk battalions.
“While much of the original equipment has died of old age, there have been ample opportunities to keep Iranian Hawks alive,” StrategyPage said. “That’s because there are still several countries using Hawk. Over 40,000 missiles were manufactured since Hawk entered service in 1960, and the US only stopped using it in 2002.…
“While the US tried to prevent Iran from getting hold of the Cold War surplus stuff, they were not always successful. Moreover, while Hawk was cutting edge 50 years ago, the tech needed to keep Hawk batteries (each with six, three-missile, launchers) operational is easier to get, or make locally, today. The big problem for Iran is obtaining the technology that enables Hawk to handle modern electronic-countermeasures. This was a frequent cause for Hawk upgrades over the last 40 years. Iran, in the meantime, has developed ways to keep up,” StrategyPage said.
But the website was not at all impressed by other recent Iranian claims to have advanced weaponry and chortled that the regime was often just recycling 1950s military technology.
“For example, last year it announced that it had developed an armed UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle or drone], with a range of 1,000 kilometers. Pictures of this new weapon showed what appeared to be a copy of a 1950s’ era American cruise missile, or target drone. These, in turn, were based on a similar weapon, the German V-1 ‘buzz bomb’ that was used extensively in World War II to bomb London.
“The Iranian Karar UAV had the benefit of more efficient jet engines, more effective flight control hardware and software, and GPS navigation. Karar is not a wonder weapon, but the Iranians are depending on a clueless international mass media, and their own citizens, to believe it is.” StrategyPage said mockingly.
The website went through a laundry list of recent Iranian weapons claims, dismissing them as old technology.
It also said, “Three years ago they showed off a new Iranian-made jet fighter, which appeared to be a make-work project for unemployed engineers. It was a bunch of rearranged parts on an old US-made F-5 (which was roughly equivalent to a 1950s era MiG-21). The new fighter, like so many other Iranian weapons projects, was more for PR than for improving military power.”
“If you go back and look at the many Iranian announcements of newly developed, high tech weapons, all you find is a photo op for a prototype. Production versions of these weapons rarely show up,” StrategyPage said.
Last year, the Iran Times published a photo the Iranian military had released of one of its Hawk missiles on a launcher. The close-up clearly showed extensive rust down a seam on the missile.