AIM-95 Agile

These limitations were made clear during the Vietnam War, when early missiles like the AIM-4 Falcon and AIM-9 Sidewinder had success rates on the order of 9 and 14%, respectively.

Faced with these dismal results, the US Navy and then US Air Force introduced new training syllabuses that placed much more emphasis on pre-shot manoeuvring, so the launch aircraft would be both behind the target and flying in the same general direction.

Unfortunately, such manoeuvring was both time consuming and potentially difficult to arrange, and in combat, there were many situations where a target would cross in front of the fighter in a "snap shot".

In the late 1960s the Navy began development of the Grumman F-14 Tomcat fighter, which offered dramatically improved performance over their F-4 Phantoms.

While the FAD was being developed, experience over Vietnam was clearly demonstrating that the idea of all-long-range combat was simply not possible given tactical limitations.

The need for improved manoeuvrability over the lumbering FAD design was clear, and this developed into the VFX proposal that in turn produced the Tomcat.

The Soviet Union also began development of an advanced high off-boresight SRM with thrust vectoring and subsequently fielded the R-73/AA-11 Archer on the MiG-29 in 1985.