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 2005, Major General Pat Roberson was the ground force commander for a combined special forces task force in Iraq given the task of...
Col. Phil Ryan is the commander of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. In 2003, in the first days of the invasion of...
In 2003, Karl Blanke was a weapons platoon commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Crossing the line of departure in the first wave, Blanke’s Marines...