With closing speeds of 1,500 ft/s (457 m/s) or more for head-on interceptions, the time available for a fighter pilot to successfully target an enemy aircraft and inflict sufficient damage to bring it down was increasingly small.

Wartime experience had shown that .50 caliber (12.7 mm) machine guns were not powerful enough to reliably down a bomber, certainly not in a single volley, and heavy autocannons did not have the range or rate of fire to ensure a hit.

Unguided rockets had been proven effective in ground-attack work during the war, and the Luftwaffe had shown that volleys of their Werfer-Granate 21 rockets, first used by elements of the Luftwaffe's JG 1 and JG 11 fighter wings on July 29, 1943, against USAAF bombers attacking Kiel and Warnemünde, could be a potent air-to-air weapon.

[citation needed] Mass production was established at the facilities of the Norris-Thermador Corp., Los Angeles, and the Hunter Douglas Division of the Bridgeport Brass Co., Riverside, California[1] Fuzes were manufactured by the Bulova Watch Co., Jackson Heights, Queens, N.Y.,[2] with rocket propellant supplied by Hercules Inc., Wilmington, Delaware,[3] metal parts supplied by Aerojet General, Downey, California,[4] and miscellaneous spare parts were made by North American Aviation.

A particularly clear demonstration of this poor accuracy occurred on August 16, 1956, when a pair of U.S. Air Force F-89s were unable to shoot down a runaway U.S. Navy drone aircraft despite expending 208 rockets in the attempt.

A volley of FFARs was as devastating as a heavy cannon with far less weight and recoil, and in the ground-attack role its marginal long-range accuracy was less important.

Pods (typically carrying seven or 19 rockets) were created for various applications, and a wide variety of specialized warheads were developed for antipersonnel, antitank, and target-marking use.

With the advent of the armed helicopter, and the increased usage during the Vietnam War, the need for launching pods that were reusable became apparent, so that later models were of all-metal construction.

These pods are described as follows: Early UH-1B/UH-1C gunships had the XM-3 subsystem using paired 24 round rectangular launchers mounted near the back edge of the sliding side doors.