According to the French military, France has flown about 4,500 flights, or sorties, in the five-month war, compared to more than 5,300 American sorties in roughly the same period.
McNamara, a former chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, was JFK's and LBJ's Secretary of Defense in the '60s and substituted statistics (body counts, bomb tonnage, numbers of bombing runs or "sorties") for any real knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam.
In the weeks after the initial bombardments in March, by contrast, the allies routinely flew 60 or more sorties a day.
That means many more than the 80 or so sorties flown each day, he said, and the use of attack aircraft like A10 Thunderbolts and the AV8b Harrier jets, which are more effective in taking out troops and equipment.
France has flown a third of all NATO strike sorties, or 2,700 flights in which ordnance was readied to be dropped.
Even fully participating members have failed to train enough targeting specialists to keep all of their planes flying sorties or to buy enough munitions to sustain a bombing campaign much beyond the present 11 weeks.
No. 11 Group put up one-third of the serviceable fighters in 600 sorties, or more than two-thirds of the total; on average.
The North's air force has more than 820 fighter jets, according to South Korea's Defence Ministry, but it does not have enough fuel to fly sorties or conduct needed drills to maintain combat effectiveness.
Many of the missions that he undertook with No. 3 Squadron and in command of No. 239 Wing were ground attack or anti-shipping sorties, rather than air-to-air combat.
Among their many accomplishments from 1941 to 1945, they flew more than 15,000 sorties, destroyed or damaged more than 400 aircraft and earned 95 Distinguished Flying Crosses.
Haftar possesses a small air force an advantage he holds over Libya Dawn, which has only one or two aircraft and every few days his fleet of vintage MIGs carries out bombing sorties over Benghazi, or, farther afield, in Ajdabiya, Misrata, Sirte, and Tripoli.
