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 2007, a destructive new weapon appeared on the battlefield in Iraq: the improvised, rocket-assisted munition. Also called a lob bomb because of the...
Before his NFL career, Alejandro Villanueva was a rifle platoon leader in the 10th Mountain Division. During a deployment to an especially restive sector...
This episode of The Spear features our first ever conversation with a US Army medic. On Oct. 3, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating was attacked...