This episode features a story from Maj. Joe Ritter, an MQ-9 pilot—the first remotely piloted aircraft story featured on The Spear. The MQ-9 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 2010, Maj. Patrick Dubois was a lieutenant deployed as a Kiowa helicopter pilot to Afghanistan. One day, a mission to provide support to...
On August 16, 2013, Capt. Brandon Thomas was a troop commander deployed to Kandahar province, Afghanistan. That day, during an unplanned halt on a...
Maj. Brian Kitching joins this episode of The Spear to share a story from a 2012 deployment in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar Province. Two months...