OPINION | I served 21 years in the Army. In all my training for mass casualty events, I never trained to dig mass graves. So when the Army rehearses collective battlefield burials, I want a direct answer: Who, exactly, are we preparing to put in the ground?

According to the Army’s account of Operation Dragon Covenant, soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, tested temporary burial procedures using simulated remains. Training photographs date to Oct. 20–21. The stated purpose was to preserve the dead for identification and eventual return to their families.

I understand the obligation to prepare for catastrophic conditions. I also understand that words such as “temporary interment” can make something devastating sound administrative. Those words describe burying people whose families may have to wait for a war to end before bringing them home.

Who are these mass graves for?

The military’s answer is already in its doctrine. Chapter 8 of ATP 4-46, published in August 2022, provides for separate temporary burial plots or sites for U.S., partner and adversary personnel. American troops are explicitly included.

That is a profoundly disturbing answer to anyone who has worn the uniform or sent someone they love into combat. My experience does not establish that the Army never maintained such plans. It explains why seeing this capability rehearsed demands more from me than a shrug about routine readiness.

The manual makes temporary interment a last resort after other options have been exhausted. It assigns approval for those operations to the geographic combatant commander and requires accountability for remains. It also directs personnel to preserve identification and mark burial locations for future recovery.

Those requirements matter because a shared burial trench can preserve individual identities, while careless handling can destroy them. Calling a burial “temporary” does not demonstrate that recovery will succeed. Families deserve evidence that the military can keep that promise under the same conditions that prevented evacuation.

The Geneva Conventions impose duties and exceptions

The legal distinction matters just as much as the emotional one. The Geneva Conventions do not impose an absolute prohibition on every collective burial. They establish duties toward the dead, including people who fought against us, and allow limited exceptions to individual burial.

Article 17 of the First Geneva Convention requires individual burial as far as circumstances permit. It also requires examination to confirm death and establish identity, respectful treatment, and maintained, identifiable graves. The duty to account for a human being does not disappear because that person was an enemy.

For prisoners of war who die in captivity, Article 120 of the Third Geneva Convention expressly permits collective graves only when unavoidable circumstances require them. It also requires burial records and graves that can be located. That is an exception with obligations, not permission to discard people.

Anyone claiming that every shared grave automatically violates the conventions would be overstating the law. Anyone treating the exception as a substitute for scrutiny would be missing its importance. The public should demand to know how commanders will document necessity, preserve identities and prevent exceptional measures from becoming ordinary practice.

Mass graves demand more than a capacity estimate

Army planners estimated that an equipped engineer company working continuously could prepare and close trenches for up to 2,400 remains daily. That is a capacity estimate, not a forecast of 2,400 American deaths each day. Even with that distinction, the scale deserves public attention.

Sgt. 1st Class Delbert Ruede, the command’s senior fatality management noncommissioned officer, offered a blunt assessment in the release. “If we went to war tomorrow, we would be making this up as we went along,” he said. I hear an urgent need for preparation in those words, and an equally urgent need for civilian oversight.

The exercise also exposed a practical problem: published spacing did not accommodate the bulldozers without threatening the burial areas. Discovering that during training is better than discovering it around actual bodies. It also demonstrates why a written procedure cannot serve as proof that a system will work.

I do not fault engineers or mortuary affairs personnel for trying to protect the dead under terrible conditions. They deserve sound procedures, adequate equipment and support for work most Americans will never have to imagine. My questions belong with the leaders defining the mission and accepting the risks.

The decades-long gap deserves an explanation

The Army says it has not conducted temporary battlefield interment at scale since the Korean War. It separately describes this religious-support training as the first of its kind in more than 20 years. Neither statement establishes that all burial training disappeared for decades.

As Military Times explains, American air superiority supported rapid evacuation of the dead during Iraq and Afghanistan. A future large-scale conflict may deny that freedom. The prospect is a war in which bringing our dead home becomes substantially harder.

That possibility deserves a national conversation before it becomes a military family’s reality. What conditions would defeat evacuation, refrigeration and other alternatives? What investments could reduce that risk, and what have officials concluded those investments cannot solve?

Preparing for an emergency does not establish that leaders intend to cause it. This exercise does not identify an imminent war or a secretly targeted population. It does make the human consequences of a major conflict harder to hide behind abstract discussions of readiness.

Concern about atrocities requires evidence and vigilance

Mass graves bring atrocities and genocide to mind, and that association is part of my alarm. This exercise, however, does not establish a plan for either. The documented facts already justify hard questions about military deaths, civilian protection and government accountability.

I want enforceable safeguards, records that survive disrupted communications and a recovery plan someone can independently evaluate. I want Congress asking what happens when burial sites become inaccessible or change hands. An honest discussion of what “temporary” could mean should include military families.

My earlier reporting on FORTRESS America examined preparations for military installations to withstand wartime infrastructure disruption. The sources reviewed do not establish that Dragon Covenant belongs to that program. Together, these subjects raise a question I believe Americans should confront: What will the war we are preparing to endure cost the people expected to survive it?

A country asking people to serve owes them more than a burial procedure. It owes them serious efforts to prevent avoidable war, honest explanations of military risk and a commitment to accountability that survives catastrophe. Respect for American troops and the humanity of our adversaries must remain obligations when circumstances become unbearable.

I spent years serving this country, and I will not treat the prospect of collective battlefield burials as emotionally routine. If American troops may occupy those trenches, their families deserve to hear that plainly. Before officials ask us to accept how efficiently the Army can bury the dead, they need to explain how they intend to keep those people alive.