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.
On December 21, a suicide bomber detonated inside the dining facility on Forward Operating Base Marez outside of Mosul. Twenty-two people were killed in...
On August 16, 2013, Capt. Brandon Thomas was a troop commander deployed to Kandahar province, Afghanistan. That day, during an unplanned halt on a...
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...