Sortie

A sortie (from the French word meaning exit or from Latin root surgere meaning to "rise up") is a deployment or dispatch of one military unit, be it an aircraft, ship, or troops, from a strongpoint.[1] The term originated in siege warfare.

For other uses, see Sortie (disambiguation).

In aviation

In military aviation, a sortie is a combat mission of an individual aircraft,[1] starting when the aircraft takes off. For example, one mission involving six aircraft would tally six sorties. The sortie rate is the number of sorties that a given unit can support in a given time.

In siege warfare

In siege warfare, the word sortie refers specifically to a sudden issuing of troops against the enemy from a defensive position — that is, an attack launched against the besiegers by the defenders. If the sortie is through a sally port, the verb to sally may be used interchangeably with to sortie.

Purposes of sorties include harassment of enemy troops, destruction of siege weaponry and engineering works,[2] joining the relief force, etc.

Sir John Thomas Jones, analyzing a number of sieges carried out during the Peninsular War (1807–1814), wrote:[3]

The events of these sieges show that a bold and vigorous sortie in force might carry destruction through every part of a besieger's approaches, where the guard is injudiciously disposed and ill commanded; but that if due precautions have been observed in forming the approaches and posting the defenders, any sortie from a besieged place must be checked with loss in their advance, when the approaches are still distant; or when the approaches are near, should a sortie succeed in pushing into them by a sudden rush, the assailants must inevitably be driven out again in a moment, with terrible slaughter.

gollark: Well, I couldn't work out how to make that available to others safely, so I have to do it.
gollark: Oh, right.
gollark: If it's too similar, then the low Levenshtein distance between apiospatial config files and your APIONET config file *could* actually open an informational path through apio*meta*space, which would then allow IRC messages to travel across it, thus possibly causing incursions.
gollark: Well, if the configuration is too similar, then it might be too similar to configuration files used by IRC networks in apiospace. Now, of course, most apiospatial information is highly cognitometaapiohyperhazardous, so it would be bad if it entered normal IRC networks.
gollark: You must install ngircd, set up appropriate SSL certificates (or use existing ones), and do various configuration.

References
  1. "sortie - Dictionary Definition". Vocabulary.com. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
  2. Leif Inge Ree Petersen (2013). Siege Warfare and Military Organization in the Successor States (400-800 AD): Byzantium, the West and Islam. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. p. 293. ISBN 978-90-04-25199-1.
  3. John Thomas Jones (1846). H.D. Jones (ed.). Journals of Sieges Carried on by the Army Under the Duke of Wellington. 2 (3rd ed.). London: John Weale. p. 331.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.