This episode features a story from Joe Ritter, an Air Force officer and MQ-9 Reaper pilot. The MQ-9, the largest remotely piloted aircraft in the US military's inventory, has a wide range of the capabilities—from providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to conducting battle damage assessments to helping a ground element direct their fires to striking enemy targets with air-to-ground Hellfire missiles. Ritter and his sensor operator brought all of these capabilities to the fight during a single mission in Afghanistan in October 2018.
In 2007, Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment deployed to the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Over their months in a combat zone,...
In the second of a two-part conversation with Ryan Hendrickson, our guest shares a story from 2016. Six years and a couple deployments after...
In 2012, Sean Marquis was an infantry platoon leader—deployed to Dehqobad, Afghanistan—with a Stryker brigade. The boundary between the platoon's area of responsibility and...