1) What's a military air "sorty?" 2) F-35 & F-22: How many sorties per day, typically? / (The F-45?)

Factual Questions
1

See queries.

i
Query one I, at least, would like to get straight even before, obviously, the second query is addressed.

Back in Gulf War I, I think, after news media/Pentagon Press Office citation of impressively large numbers of “sorties,”–reported as “bombing runs”–I remember reading elsewhere a down-play of this particular number as fact relative to individual-planes-bombing-things. The writer said that a report of five sorties, e.g., might be that four (unspecified) aircraft companied or also took off and were involved in some form, and one of the planes did the deed reported.

So which is right, as used by military, which counts more in my book.

II
As to the discrete question on the F-35 and F-22, I ask in regard to its factoring in–correctly so–to the budgeting, strategic direction of the US force, and which, naturally always includes the “F-35 sucks/doesn’t suck because x, y, z…”

In particular, if I can ask you, if you care/can, to take a look at the source of this particular OP section: It’s an articel (to me a sober one, although YMMV) from a multipart series published in* National Review.*

III
The author wants to limit production of the current mix to advance a new vehicle/program, the “F-45.”

Is that a thing, beyond a conceit for those, like the author, who are unhappy with the F-35.

Many an OP has been on that, and we might was well one datum down.

Thnx.

2

Doesn’t answer your questions, but:

The singular isn’t “sorty”, it’s “sortie”.

3

A sortie is a single flight by a single aircraft. It’s not more complicated than that.

4

A “sortie” is basically a mission where one aircraft departs and returns. The number of sorties of a particular aircraft depends on the mission type, and its duration in transit to/from it’s particular objective.

For example, a B-52 taking off from Minot, ND, transiting a hypothetical 3 hours to make a practice bombing run in Utah, deploying its weapons (say, 1 hour), and transiting back the 3 hours to Minot, would have a sortie rate of 3.42 sorties per day (24 hours divided by that sortie’s 7), notwithstanding it’s training rearm/refuel time. This one hour over the objective may include multiple targets, with multiple bombing runs.

In another example, an F-16 launching from Kunsan AB for an air-to-air Combat Air Patrol (CAP) may transit less than an hour (say 30 minutes) to the DMZ, expend all it’s munitions knocking North Korean MiGs out of the sky in 15 minutes, and return to Kunsan in less that same 30 minutes. Assuming a one hour rearm/refuel time prior to the next launch, then your fighter can support a hypothetical 10.6 sorties a day (24 / 2.25).

I have friends that have pulled 18-hour sorties from the BIOT up to Afghanistan, with loiter times in the few-hour range to provide air support for ground troops. The fatigue is not just on the airframe, but on the aircrews as well. That’s why you rotate pilots for high-sortie days.

Sortie generation rates become very critical when you’re trying to sustain an effort to achieve air superiority over a region, such as in a hypothetical war with North Korea. Some of our closer South Korean bases, such as Osan and Kunsan ABs would be immediately struck by NK artillery, slowing sortie generation down while runway repairs are completed. Bases in Japan such as Misawa AB and Kadena AB, as well as Andersen AB in Guam would have to pick up the slack to fill the required gap in firepower while Osan and Kunsan recovered. The other air bases are further away, which grows transit times, thus reducing the number of sorties able to be generated.

To answer the hypothetical on F-35 and F-22s, it again depends on the transit time to the objective, how “busy” that pilot is going to be on the objective, and how quickly they can be rearmed/refueled. When I was in Kunsan, we were able to launch multiple jets an hour and ‘recover’ them. It was exhausting for the aircrews and maintainers, but if you have the manpower to support it, you can do it. It ran hell on the airframes though, because ever so often (in terms of flight hours) you have to tear apart equipment and flight hardware, inspect/service it, and reinstall it. I wasn’t a Maintainer, and unfortunately don’t have those numbers.

IMHO, I’m not a terrible fan of the F-35 because of the cost overruns and some documented underperformance of it, but it does bear discussion for replacing the aging F-16 with some better-suited Close Air Support (CAS) aircraft to supplement existing (and embattled) A-10 airframes.

I did ask this question of some Naval Aviators–carriers are planned to support 120 sorties a day, limited by fuel/munitions. The Air Force has far more storage for both of those, and are part of the planning factors. However, airfields are basically sitting ducks for artillery/airstrikes.

Tripler
I love the A-10.

5

The USAF just needs to turn the A-10 over to the Army. It would make sense. The Army and Marines on the ground are the ones that need it, the Army already has attack helicopters that are pretty fast and the A-10 is pretty slow as far as warplanes go. I bet the warrant officers would love it.

6

Oh, I should add (I might be past the edit window), that sortie numbers may seem “inflated” by support aircraft. It was common during the Vietnam war to have multiple support aircraft escorting a pair of bombers, to protect the bombers from ground and air threats. Ever hear of “fighter escorts” during WWII? Similar concept.

In a more modern example, during Desert Storm, you may have wanted to strike a particular enemy Command and Control (C2) site with a pair of F-111s. These two F-111s, loaded for a bombing run, may require a pair of F-16s for anti-air defense, and a single EF-111As for Electronic Warfare for Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD, basically surface-to-air weapon suppression). This one single mission would then require five sorties to accomplish one objective. This may have been overlapped by a seperate, long-term AWACs sortie so your F-16 fighter escorts could see ahead, and engage any airborne Iraqi threats.

The planning for these missions was derived from an Air Tasking Order (ATO) that detailed each individual sortie, its objective, duration, weapons loadout, etc. This ATO was developed by a headquarters known as an Air Operations Center (or AOC). Lots of planning and networking, especially when you have to deconflict the Joint Services’ requirements for sorties.

Tripler
Lots of networking for lots sorties.

7

The “fighter Mafia” would hate for me to admit it, but I agree with you. So long as I have a ‘gun run’ when I need it, I could care less who’s branch is stenciled on the side of the gunship.

But low and slow for CAS has its advantages.

Tripler
The fighter Mafia still exists, unfortunately.

8

I do have a vague recollection of a post-Desert Storm Army tweaking of the Air Force attempt to cut the A-10. ISTR talking about calling it the OA-10 to at least give lip service to the Key West Agreement. Budgetary issues have changed a bit since then. That period was the start of the post-Cold War military drawdown.

We’re just coming off another big round of spending cuts. The Army answer in 2015, was they didn’t want it. The Army already cut a big chunk of it’s more expensive mechanized forces in the early post-9/11 period to create a lighter force. In the post-sequester/Budget Control Act of 2013 the new cuts were coming in the big chunks out of the most expensive part of landpower in the Army budget - Soldiers. The BCA era question for Army leadership is “How many more maneuver battalions would we have to be cut to keep the A-10 flying?” The last Army answer to the question was too many.

9

Modern military thinking would advocate a single military, with a unified command structure, without any separate Army, Navy, Air Force branches at all.

But I can’t think of anything that all five of the Joint Chiefs would reject quicker or more vehemently!
(Except maybe cutting the military budget.)

The USA is sort-of doing this in practice, by having a Commander in the theatre, whose orders are followed by any US forces in the area. (Though they are still transmitted thru separate chains of command.) This is moving toward an integrated military.

This is partly a result of problems from way back in WWII, especially in the Pacific, when errors happened due to poor communication or conflict between the Army & Navy forces (and there wasn’t even a separate Air Force then).

10

You’re talking about Unified Combatant Commands, with a single Combatant Commander (CCDR) with functional commanders in their specialties such as the Joint Forces Land Combatant Commander (JFLCC), Joint Forces Maritime Combatant Commander (JFMCC), and the Joint Forces Air Combatant Commander (JFACC). It is possible for a CCDR to be ‘dual hatted’ as a functional commander (CCDR is also the JFMCC).

Don’t forget the debacles of EAGLE CLAW and the invasion of Grenada. But don’t get me started on ADCON, OPCON, and TACON.

Tripler
Did I answer the ‘sortie’ question?

11

There are close looks being taken within the Air Force at whether to invest in a new light attack aircraft, that would either be a turboprop or small jet with just enough sensors and stuff to drop precision guided munitions. The idea that spending something like $5,000 a flight hour to fly an airplane on low-threat counter terrorism missions in places like Afghanistan is a better prospect than spending $30,000+ for a fourth or fifth generation fighter to do the same things with a lot of unneeded capability. I’m not totally convinced this math works out, as the opportunity cost of investing in a new fleet of aircraft that have literally no use again near-peer adversaries may be too great. But it’s a very valid question, and the Air Force is looking at it.

But the idea of this F-45 air superiority fighter is, IMHO, fucking bonkers. There’s no Taliban Air Force for it to overmatch. Considering it’s selling point is the lack of capability (at a low low price!), it’s going to be more than mincemeat for any near-peer adversaries. You can’t launch three sorties a day when there’s only a 10% chance your low cost, low capability fighter makes it home.

The Navy and Air Force are looking at replacements to the F-18 and F-22 (NOT an F-35 replacement as some suspect!) to be fielded maybe in the 2035-ish timeframe. There is literally zero chance that these aircraft will embrace the F-45 idea, though some attributes will surely be shared, like increasing capabilities on passive sensors.

And this idea of the Army taking the A-10 is just people with no idea what’s actually going on just fantasizing about things. It will never, ever happen. The Army has far better ways to spend billions of dollars than taking over the A-10s role, especially when the Army can simply raise hell about the issue if the Air Force proposes full retirement again, and Congress will force the Air Force to keep the A-10s flying… probably for decades, whether or not that is a great idea, and whether or not there are better ways to do the missions.

12

OMFG!!

13

From the French, for the few folks on this MB who wouldn’t know that: sortir; to go out, leave

14

Not just the Pacific. The war’s worst (American) friendly fire incident occurred at Sicily:

Friendly Fire’s Deadliest Day

The article seems to conclude:

But I’ve always felt the root of the problem was poor coordination – nobody alerted the gunners that friendlies were expected (possibly for poorly-thought-out"security" reasons).

15

I agree with this. A sortie is a flight.

I disagree with this completely. In my era in USAF the “sortie rate” was the number of flights = sorties flown per day per aircraft. Fly a jet once a day, that’s a sortie rate of 1.0. Fly a jet twice a day that’s a sortie rate of 2.0.

The duration of any given flight has nothing to do with it except that it’s impossible to fit very many long flights into 24 hours wheras you can fit in lots of shorter flights.
Typically the point of a “sortie rate” is that it gives you a measure of how productive your fleet is. For fighter/attack airplanes it’s a measure of how much deliverable work you can get done per day. Intrinsic things that limit the sortie rate are how often the airplanes break, how many consumables like tires and munitions you have, how many crew you have, etc. Extrinsic factors may be resupply of parts, fuel, or munitions, distance to target set = average mission duration, expected combat loss rates, etc.

If you know that a particular squadron has 18 planes and can deliver a sortie rate of 3 for a week or 2 for a month or 1.5 indefinitely, you know that considering the intrinsic factors only you can drop 183 = 54 plane-loads of bombs per day in the first week, 218 = 36 plane-loads per day in the next 3 weeks, and 1.5*18 = 27 plane-loads per day indefinitely. Less your estimations of the extrinsic factors.

Taking your target list divided by your sortie rate tells you how many squadrons you need to send to the war. It’s the same sort of math any factory production system uses to figure out how many workers and machines it takes tomake X number of widgets.

16

Go wash your mouth out with soap. It’s not nice to trigger post traumatic staff disorder when I don’t have a laser pointer nearby for comfort.

17

Brother, that’s what I was trying to describe! I think you and I are talking about the same thing, but maybe I just put too much emphasis on flying times to illustrate later how bases closer to the targets can generate more sorties than those a long way off–the distant ones have to overcome the ‘air bridge’.

I was just a dopey CE, EOD guy that was stuck in the Command Post for lots of these discussions. You have a far, far better description than I do.

Tripler
I had to clear and fix runways to keep the rates up.

18

:: pops smoke and runs ::