During the Vietnam War, the 1972 Easter Offensive was a major operation launched by North Vietnam to destabilize South Vietnam and strengthen its own hand in ongoing peace talks in Paris. The offensive was particularly noteworthy due to its duration and ferocity as well as the extensive use of tanks by North Vietnam, a rarity during the Vietnam War…

In this episode Maj. John A. Meyer shares a story from his first deployment, in 2007, to Afghanistan. On July 27, his platoon and a group of Afghan National Army soldiers were moving along the road next to the Kunar River during a squadron mission to secure the valley. The Afghan soldiers began to cross a bridge when they looked down and saw a grou…

National security professionals often conceptualize a continuum of conflict as a framework to understand the wide variety of ways in which conflict can manifest itself. It extends from relative peace on one end, terrorism and low-intensity conflict, up through large-scale combat, all the way to strategic rivalry in which nuclear weapons even come i…

This episode of The Spear features a conversation with Josh Webster. A US Army officer, he previously served as a US Air Force pararescueman—a member of an elite part of the Air Force whose mission includes rescuing and providing medical treatment to wounded military personnel. He shares a story from 2010 in Afghanistan, when his team was called on…

In this episode, Brian Chontosh, a retired Marine Corps officer, details the circumstances of an intense and complex combat operation in Iraq that involved Brian and his Marines using captured enemy weapons to clear an entrenched hostile force that ambushed their convoy. Brian ultimately received the Navy Cross, one of the top valor award in the US…

By its very nature, urban warfare involves the presence of civilians. And when cities become battlefields, it may be necessary to evacuate noncombatants from them—either due to humanitarian imperatives or because military objectives require it. But an array of legal obligations and other considerations arise when civilians are evacuated. And becaus…

This episode features a story from Joe Ritter, an Air Force officer and MQ-9 Reaper pilot. The MQ-9, the largest remotely piloted aircraft in the US military's inventory, 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…

When the Chinese company DeepSeek recently released an artificial intelligence model called R1, its surprisingly advanced capability and the efficiency with which DeepSeek claimed to have trained the model sparked a wave of discussion about how rapidly Chinese AI development was progressing. But how is the competition to achieve superior AI technol…

Lieutenant Colonel Liam Walsh is currently the commander of the 4th Battalion of the 9th Infantry Regiment, "Manchu." In this episode of The Spear, Liam speaks with MWI's Charlie Faint about his experiences in reacting to an IED strike in Iraq and responding to a Taliban attack on a forward operating base in Afghanistan, and how a series of setback…

After twenty years of America’s post-9/11 wars and the US military’s struggle to build capable and effective security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an important discussion taking place about what role security force assistance should play for the United States in the very different strategic environment that is taking shape. Will it be a…

According to US military doctrine, legitimacy is one of the twelve principles of joint operations. But that concept—legitimacy—is a complex one. How is it defined? How should we understand the ways in which the laws of war, rules of engagement, national policies, and civilian harm mitigation measures overlap—and how they differ? How can rules of en…

Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter overcame a series of bad decisions in his youth—as well as a rough start to his Army career—to become a highly successful Special Forces senior noncommissioned officer. In this episode, Chuck joins MWI's Charlie Faint for a discussion about resilience, personal responsibility, motivation, good leadership, and the circums…

On August 30, 2021, General Chris Donahue stepped onto the ramp of the last American C-17 in Afghanistan and into the pages of history. At the time, he was a major general commanding the 82nd Airborne Division, leading his paratroopers as the United States withdrew from Afghanistan after almost twenty years of combat. He would go on to serve as a c…

In what has become a holiday tradition, the Urban Warfare Project Podcast turns its attention to an important question: What items should be on a military force's urban warfare holiday wish list? To do so, John Spencer is joined once again this year by two urban warfare scholars to discuss the unique capabilities, ideas, and initiatives they would …

For well over a decade, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad managed to hold onto power during a complicated civil war involving a number of anti-regime rebel groups. And then, rebels launched a lightning offensive that saw a series of Syrian cities—including, ultimately, the capital Damascus—fall. Assad was gone and more than a half-century of rule by hi…

Long before his selection as the fifteenth sergeant major of the Army, Dan Dailey served multiple combat deployments in Iraq, first during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s and then in Operation Iraqi Freedom more than a decade later. In this episode of The Spear, he joins MWI's Charlie Faint to reflect on those deployments—describing in pa…

When thousands of Hamas militants invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, there were only 110 police officers on duty spread across hundreds of square kilometers, concentrated in four police stations and several other posts. Despite their relatively small numbers, these officers played a critical role that day. On this episode, John Spencer is …

In this episode, retired US Air Force Col. Kim Campbell joins to share a story from 2003. A career A-10 pilot, her squadron was deployed to the Middle East at the beginning of the war in Iraq. During a mission, she and her flight lead in another A-10 responded to a call for air support from a US unit engaged with Iraqi troops. On her last rocket pa…

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, one of its first targets was the city of Mariupol. Despite being outnumbered by—and less well equipped than—their adversaries, Ukrainian defenders held out for three months. As the Russian siege of the city intensified, Ukrainian forces defended a shrinking perimeter with a command post in the Azovstal …

In this episode of The Spear, MWI's John Amble is joined by Major Tyson Walsh. In 2013, during a deployment in Afghanistan, he was working out alone late at night on the heavily fortified Bagram Airfield, the largest US and coalition base in the country. It's the last place he expected to end up in a fight—he didn't even have his weapon with him. B…

Writing is often treated as a peripheral activity in the military, but it is a defining characteristic of any profession—including the profession of arms. Professional military writing is the way we share information, new ideas, and creative solutions to collective problems. It’s the way we drive bottom-up change. And it’s vital if the Army is to b…

Command Sergeant Major Alex Kupratty enlisted in the Army after a year at the Virginia Military Institute and was immediately assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment, where he spent most of the next twenty years of his military career, culminating in the position of command sergeant major of the Second Ranger Battalion. He is now the command sergeant …