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 October 2008, Maj. Nick Eslinger was a lieutenant on his first deployment as a platoon leader in Iraq. While on patrol one day,...
JJ Pinter graduated from West Point and was commissioned as a field artillery officer. A few short years after 9/11, JJ found himself in...
This episode of The Spear features a conversation with Capt. Lindsay Heisler. An aviation officer and Apache pilot, in December 2015 she was part...