War is killing people and blowing things up. Dominic Nicholls on the Podcast Ukraine Today

When I was in the Army in 1963, stationed in Korea on a HAWK Surface to Air Missile (SAM) site, our Battery had two launcher sections with nine missiles in each section for a total of eighteen missiles theoretically ready to fire. We had an additional eighteen missiles in the missile maintenance building for a total of thirty six missiles. Considering that the Chinese Air Force had more than 3.000 planes and that every HAWK launch didn’t result in a kill – far from it – that never seemed like enough ammunition. It was among the many things I grumbled about when I was in Korea.

To me it seemed like our whole HAWK system, our whole presence in Korea, was a sham. Only having thirty six missiles, was part of it. On a daily basis, we wore what the Army called fatigues, although they were olive-drab, they were emblazoned with a white rectangular over our hearts on which our last names were printed in in large block letters. We seemed like perfect targets. Additionally, under our olive-drab fatigues, we all wore regulation bright white T-shirts showing a spiffy bright white triangle at the regulation open collar.

But, most of all, our HAWK system did not work as advertised – when I say advertised, I mean advertised up the Chain of Command to the President – even with constant maintenance. I now read – in Wikipedia – that the quality of tube-based electronics, gave the radars in the early Hawk systems a mean time between failures of only 43 hours. We were about forty miles behind the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which is the defacto line separating North and South Korea and the presumed spot where the North Koreans would start their attack, and our resupply and repair depot, in Seoul, was between us and the theoretical enemy. In total, it seemed like were in a phony war as a way of making money for the military-industrial complex. In the end, it seemed like we were just playing pretend war.

This war, between Russia and Ukraine is different, when the Russians attacked Ukraine, they were definitely not playing at war. This war is the dreadful real thing. On a daily basis, an hourly basis, really, both the Russians and Ukrainians are now trying to kill as many people as possible. This takes ammunition, lots of it, way more than we had in Korea, and the problem both the Russians and the Ukrainians have is that they are running out of ammunition. What I mean by ammunition is more than just bullets- I don’t know how they are doing with actual assault rifle bullets, 7.62 x 39mm for older Russian made gear and the more powerful 7.62 x 51mm NATO supplied gear – I mean anything that is shot down range; 155mm howitzer shells, rockets, even loitering munitions like Iranian Shahed drones.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this headline US Army Awards Raytheon $1.2B for Ukraine NASAMS in my Google News feed. It turns out that the United States is worried that we are running too low on the ammunition that we have squirreled away for future wars and, rather than draw down from our reserves, we are ordering, as part of the US’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems that will take twenty four months to build and deliver. This is, in effect, a very much modernized and updated HAWK system that the Pentagon thinks Ukraine will still need two years from now.

The inference from that headline is that the United States has relearned the Modern wars take an incredible amount of equipment and ammunition lesson. The days of having only thirty-six HAWK missiles ready to go are long gone.

As an aside, I read in the same Wikipedia article that the vacuum tube based electronics {of HAWK has been replaced}with modern solid-state circuits, the mean time between failures has increased a hundred fold, and, according to Janes, the original system’s single shot kill probability was 0.56; Hawk improved this to 0.85. End aside.