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.
Rick Jackson enlisted in the Marine Corps in the 1980s, later attending Officer Candidates School and commissioning as an infantry officer. He joins this...
In 2006, Jeremy Fox was a platoon leader deployed in Iraq, his platoon tasked for part of that deployment with providing security for an...
On August 11, 2004, Staff Sgt. John Borman’s platoon ventured out on what was supposed to be a short counter-mortar observation mission. Except that...