America prepares for the mass burial business

The Pentagon calls it preparedness. Nothing says confidence in the next war quite like practicing how to bury thousands of your own soldiers.

The U.S. Army is apparently getting ready for a war in which bringing home the dead one by one may no longer be an option.

After decades without large-scale battlefield burial exercises, American soldiers are once again learning how to dig mass graves. Not exactly the sort of military training that inspires confidence in the promise of victory.

Soldiers from the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command and the 20th Engineer Brigade, together with military chaplains and religious support personnel, recently gathered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to rehearse the logistics of burying large numbers of fallen American troops. Excavators, bulldozers and military engineering equipment were brought in to establish temporary burial sites, while personnel practiced how to preserve remains for later identification and repatriation.

The Army says it has not needed this kind of large-scale operation since the Korean War, which claimed nearly 37,000 American military lives between 1950 and 1953. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military generally managed to transport its dead back to the United States rather than resorting to mass temporary burial sites.

Apparently, those days of relatively manageable casualty numbers are no longer something the Pentagon is prepared to take for granted.

The exercise was not exactly a small undertaking. A standard temporary burial plot consists of five trenches, with capacity for 100 casualties. During the North Carolina drills, soldiers managed to prepare one such plot in an average of one hour and 15 minutes. According to the Army, eight bulldozers and four military excavators could theoretically provide temporary burial capacity for as many as 2,400 soldiers within 24 hours.

Two thousand four hundred dead American soldiers. In a single day.

That is quite an impressive logistical achievement, although perhaps not the sort of performance statistic military public relations departments would normally want to advertise. Other armies boast about precision strikes, advanced weapons systems and technological superiority. The American Army can now boast about its ability to organize industrial-scale funerals.

Naturally, the Pentagon presents the exercise as a matter of dignity, respect and preparedness. And there is nothing wrong with making sure fallen soldiers are treated properly, identified and eventually returned to their families. That responsibility does not disappear simply because a battlefield becomes overwhelmed with casualties.

But the obvious question remains: what kind of war is the United States preparing for that makes this particular skill worth revisiting after more than two decades?

Army personnel involved in the exercise acknowledged that without this training, the military would essentially be improvising if such a situation arose tomorrow. The stated aim is to develop a systematic, field-tested approach to managing the fallen in a high-intensity conflict.

Even military chaplains, who have not received this kind of battlefield burial training in more than 20 years, are now being brought into the operation. Apparently, the Army wants to make sure that when the bulldozers stop, somebody is available to say a prayer.

The official explanation is sensible enough: high-intensity warfare can produce casualties on a scale that makes individual burials and religious ceremonies impossible while fighting continues. But the practical preparations reveal something that the usual speeches about military strength and deterrence tend to leave out.

Wars are not computer simulations. They do not end with a victory screen, and advanced weapons do not make soldiers immortal. Even the world's most powerful military has to consider what happens when the casualties become too numerous to evacuate.

Washington can talk about military superiority, global leadership and the ability to fight on several fronts. But somewhere in North Carolina, the Army is measuring trenches, calculating burial capacity and training soldiers to handle thousands of bodies.

Perhaps this is what military preparedness looks like when the optimistic PowerPoint presentations are finally put away.

America is not just preparing to fight its next war. It is rehearsing what to do when the body count becomes too large to bring everyone home.