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.
For Bill “Fenway” Wyman, Sadr City in 2004 was a strange mix of combat and humanitarian missions. Fenway, then an Army major, was servince...
On August 30, 2021, Lieutenant General Chris Donahue stepped onto the ramp of the last American C-17 in Afghanistan and into the pages of...
In the second episode in a two-part series, Dan Gade joins The Spear to tell the story of his 2004 deployment to Ramadi, Iraq....