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 2008, Maj. Emily Spencer was an EOD platoon leader in Iraq. In April, she and one of her teams accompanied a route clearance...
Lieutenant Colonel Liam Walsh is currently the commander of the 4th Battalion of the 9th Infantry Regiment, "Manchu." In this episode of The Spear,...
In 2012, Rich Kent was a platoon leader deployed to Panjwai in Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Tasked with locating an IED cell in a small...