A sortie (from the French word meaning 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.
In siege warfare
In
siege warfare, the word
sortie refers specifically to a sudden sending 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,
Sir John Thomas Jones, analyzing a number of sieges carried out during the Peninsular War (1807–1814), wrote:
In aviation
In military aviation, a sortie is an aircraft flight or mission (training or combat),
starting when the aircraft takes off. For example, one mission involving six aircraft would tally six sorties. The
sortie rate of a unit is the number of sorties that it can support in a given time.
