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...
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...
Many episodes of The Spear have featured stories of action at the tactical level. This episode departs from that pattern, as Capt. Pete Mitchell ...