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 August 2007, a US Army Special Forces team came under fire while passing through a valley in Afghanistan. The call for support went...
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...
In 2004, Tim Strabbing was a lieutenant and platoon commander in the Marine Corps, deployed to an area just outside Fallujah in Iraq's restive...