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.
As a lieutenant, Maj. Jesse Lansford was deployed to Afghanistan. A Kiowa helicopter pilot assigned as an aviation platoon leader, he rarely found himself...
In August 2007, a US Army Special Forces team came under fire while passing through a valley in Afghanistan. The call for support went...
In 2007, Patrick Melton was a military police soldier on his first deployment in Baghdad, when his combat outpost was hit by a barrage...