File:Operation Odyssey Dawn - No Fly Zone - Libya March 2011.jpg

English: Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya 2011. No Fly Zone (NFZ). US Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, Director of The Joint Staff: “Here is a good depiction of what the no-fly zone looks like right now. You can see we’ve got essentially seven patrol stations over the Mediterranean from which the aircraft staged themselves before being called to enforce the U.N. mandate. Some of these missions are what we call defensive combat air (DCA). You can see the patrol stations for these missions depicted in blue. These are missions designed solely to keep the airspace free of Libyan combat aircraft, and all of these missions are now being flown by our partner nation pilots. The other patrol stations, depicted in red, are designed for interdiction missions (INT), meaning these strikes conduct -- are conducted at ground targets, either fixed or moving. The United States is flying about half of all of these missions. You can also see the no-fly zone as it exists today, running coast to coast across the northern part of the country and extending further south. As I mentioned before, one of the airstrikes we conducted last night took out some SA-2 and SA-3 surface-to-air missile sites down in Sebha. You can also get a sense here of the international contributions to the no-fly zone mission. More than 350 aircraft are involved in some capacity, either enforcing the no-fly zone or protecting the civilian populace. Only slightly more than half belong to the United States. It’s fair to say that the coalition is growing in both size and capability every day. Today there are nine other contributing nations, to include Qatar, and thousands of coalition military personnel involved in this effort. They’re deployed across Europe and on the Mediterranean at bases ashore and on any of one of the 38 ships at sea.”