Allocation of Sorties in Air Interdiction

This paper analyzes the problem of air interdiction in a simplified “hostile country” in which the flow of interdicted material is entirely unidirectional. The action is assumed to be constrained by a minimum tour-survival probability. Results are presented that permit the existence of feasible solutions of the constrained problem to be determined, that solve the problem completely in the unconstrained case, and that enable optimal solutions to be determined in the constrained case (but only when the probability-of-loss function p(x) is a step function).