“SA-2s don’t play no games/Just kickin’ *** and takin’ names.”
So goes a line from the song Viet Vet by Dick Jonas, a former F-4 Phantom pilot in the Vietnam War who later found a second career as a professional singer.
The SA-2 Dick references is the SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile. SAMs, starting with the Dvina in 1959 and followed by a slew of successors, have been the bane of American and allied military aircraft for over six decades now. In some ways, SAMs are a more daunting foe than enemy fighters such as MiGs. It’s comparatively easy, after all, to shoot back at those, whether with one’s own fighter planes or bomber gunners.
Shooting back at SAM missile launchers and their support radars requires a specialized mission known as Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) — and accordingly, a more specialized weapon. To prevent harm from SAMs requires fighting fire with fire — it takes a HARM missile.
HARM Missile Early History and Specifications
The AGM-88 HARM (Air-to-Ground-Missile, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile) was designed by Texas Instruments in 1983 and entered into operational service in 1985; it is now manufactured by Raytheon. The HARM is the successor to the AGM-45 Shrike — which earned some movie fame via the 1991 motion picture Flight of the Intruder starring Brad Johnson, Willem Dafoe, and Danny Glover — and the AGM-78 Standard ARM.
According to the official U.S. Air Force fact sheet, “The AGM-88 can detect, attack and destroy a target with minimum aircrew input. The proportional guidance system that hones in on enemy radar emissions has a fixed antenna and seeker head in the missile nose. A smokeless, solid-propellant, dual-thrust rocket motor propels the missile. The F-16C is the only aircraft in the Air Force current inventory to use the AGM-88.
“The missile is operationally deployed throughout the Air Force and in full production as a joint U.S. Air Force-U.S. Navy project.”
Speaking of the Navy, the HARM is also employed by the EA-18G Growler.
Specifications of the HARM missile include an overall length of 13 feet 8 inches, a launch weight of 800 pounds, a diameter of 10 inches, a wingspan of 3 feet 8 inches, a range of over 30 miles, and a max airspeed of Mach-2.9.
Combat-Tested
The HARM missile was first blooded in combat during the 1991 Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm), during SEAD missions carried out by the F-4G Wild Weasel variant of the legendary F-4 Phantom II and targeting Saddam Hussein’s SAM sites. As the late great military aviation author Robert F. “Bob” Dorr noted: “F-4G Advanced Wild Weasels flew many hundreds of other combat missions without suffering losses – taking out 74 percent of the enemy missile radars destroyed during the war. Just one F-4G Phantom was lost.”
HARMs went on to be used against Serbian SAMs during Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999, wherein the AGM’s performance wasn’t as impressive, with a confirmed destruction of only three of Slodoban Milosevic’s original SA-6 batteries, but in fairness, that air campaign as a whole wasn’t as impressively executed as Desert Storm’s was, so you can’t heap all the blame on the HARM there. HARMs were also used during Operation Iraqi Freedom and the 2011 military intervention in Libya.
Where Are They Now?
Beside the U.S. Air Force and Navy, the AGM-88 is in use with the air forces of Australia, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
Most recently, the missile has been sent to Ukraine, which delpoys it with their MiG-29 Fulcrums and Sukhoi Su-27 Flankers.
Meanwhile, the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio, has a HARM missile in its restoration hangar, as well as well as a AN/ASQ-213A HARM Targeting System listed as being “currently in storage.”
Christian D. Orr is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch and The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS).
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