The air combat of today is less a direct descendant of its World War I progenitor than the reinvention of it. In the late 1950s, at the dawn of the supersonic age, the one-on-one, close-in dogfight was officially decreed obsolete. The flying services of many nations reasoned that future air-to-air engagements would be fought with guided missiles launched from great distances, far beyond the range at which the eye of the pilot could discern the enemy. Acting on this conviction, the U.S. Navy commissioned (and the Air Force later adopted) the F-4 Phantom. Designed in the new idiom for air superiority fighters, it lacked the quintessential weapon of the traditional dogfight - a gun.