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 2014 and 2015, the US Army sent soldiers to help respond to an outbreak of Ebola in Liberia. Capt. Jerod Brammer led one...
In 2003, Maj. John Spencer was a platoon leader in Iraq. One night, while waiting in an ambush position, he gave the order for...
Col. Bill Ostlund is the director of the Department of Military Instruction at West Point. In 1990, as a lieutenant, he arrived at his...