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 the spring of 2003, Lt. Col. Dave Rittgers commanded a Special Forces team deploying to Afghanistan. As soon as the team arrived in...
In this episode, Brian Chontosh, a retired Marine Corps officer, details the circumstances of an intense and complex combat operation in Iraq that involved...
As a lieutenant, Maj. Jesse Lansford was deployed to Afghanistan. A Kiowa helicopter pilot assigned as an aviation platoon leader, he rarely found himself...