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 2003, Maj. John Spencer was a platoon leader in Iraq. One night, while waiting in an ambush position, he gave the order for...
In the summer of 1993, Greg Banner was a newly appointed company commander in 10th Special Forces Group. Halfway around the world, ethnic tensions...
Lt. Col. Brian Kitching joins this episode of The Spear to share a story from a 2012 deployment in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar Province. Two...