The Army is preparing for the grim possibility of burying fallen soldiers on the battlefield, testing how fast it can dig temporary graves while preserving remains for eventual identification and return to families after the end of a conflict.
During an exercise in North Carolina, engineers, preventative medicine teams, chaplains and fatality management specialists prepared for mass temporary interment not used on a large scale since the Korean War, the Army announced in a release last week.
For more than twenty years during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. air superiority allowed the quick evacuation of remains back to the United States through mortuary affairs channels. Future conflicts — especially those with large-scale combat operations, or LSCO — may not have the same capabilities.
