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.
Col. Bill Ostlund retired from the Army in 2019. In 1990, as a lieutenant, he arrived at his first unit as an officer and...
Col. Phil Ryan is an Army aviator who has spent much of his career in the Army's most elite, special operations aviation units. In...
In 2003, Karl Blanke was a weapons platoon commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Crossing the line of departure in the first wave, Blanke’s Marines...