Previously NATO had relied on having almost complete air supremacy during a war, so the obvious answer to the Hind problem was to shoot them down.
Given the surprising results in close-range combat, the main lesson was that helicopters should only be engaged at long range using look-down weapons like the AIM-7 and AIM-9.
[2] The latter demonstrated that the Cobra was a fleeting target when employed over land, but worried about the Navy, whose search and rescue helicopters operated over water with no cover available.
The urgency of this threat grew as the west learned of the capabilities of the Hind and (later) the 9K114 Shturm (AT-6 Spiral) anti-tank missile.
The results of earlier experiments, and the lack of modern organic air-defence units in the Army, suggested that the Hind would run rampant over the battlefield.
The Hind was a large aircraft with high speed and relatively low maneuverability, like the CH-3E Sea King, but heavily armed with a two-man crew, like the Cobra.
[5] The 20th's primary mission is infiltration/exfiltration of special operations units, and were equipped (at the time) with the Bell UH-1N Twin Huey and CH-3E Sea King.
This led to a series of claims and counter-claims, so for the second week the helicopter pilots were instructed to follow Air Force procedure and call out "guns-guns-guns" when "firing".
[citation needed] Due to their maneuverability, helicopters are very dangerous opponents when matched against fixed winged aircraft.
In particular, in 1981 the Army started the Low Cost Battlefield Attack Aircraft project and eventually built the Scaled Composites ARES to test these concepts.
In the UK, British Aerospace started a similar project called Small Agile Battlefield Aircraft.