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.
This episode features the first of a two-part conversation with Ryan Hendrickson. In this part, he shares a story from a 2010 deployment. On...
In 2008, Maj. Emily Spencer was an EOD platoon leader in Iraq. In April, she and one of her teams accompanied a route clearance...
On July 13, 2008, around two hundred Taliban fighters ambushed American and Afghan soldiers in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan. The ensuing fight...