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Army modernizing handling of remains

PETERSBURG, Va. — The Army is modernizing how it handles dead soldiers’ remains for the first time in several decades as the increasing number of military fatalities has given more urgency to the issue.

Mortuary affairs officials are focusing on the service’s ability to perform work on remains contaminated in chemical, biological or nuclear incidents, and improving methods to preserve remains while they’re being transported home, according to combat developer Lee Green, who is leading the effort based at Fort Lee.

“People don’t really like to talk about death and think about fatalities,” Green said. “When the Department of Defense starts experiencing fatalities, it becomes a high priority.”

The Army provides mortuary services for the U.S. armed forces, and Fort Lee is home to the specialist groups that collect, identify and return dead soldiers’ and contractors’ remains. More than 4,600 sailors, Marines, soldiers and airmen have died in U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army must be able to speed up its deployment capabilities so it can do mortuary-affairs work after an attack with weapons of mass destruction, or after a natural disaster that overwhelms civilian authorities’ capacity to handle widespread fatalities.

One initiative aims to develop a robotic system to recover those killed in military operations.

“We don’t want to risk the living to recover the dead,” Green said. “It’s kind of a long-term science project, but it’s a pretty interesting one.”

The modernization initiative also is focusing on three key systems: a remains-decontamination system; a remains-transfer case; and a mobile remains-collection system, Green said.

Green said the Army also is putting $19 million into developing and buying a rugged remains-decontamination system by 2011 or 2012.

“Probably the biggest funding requirement is in the research needed to help us be able to render all remains safe to give back to the family,” which is not currently the case, Green said.

Anchored in off-the-shelf commercial equipment, the system would include special pouches designed to keep dangerous contaminants from spreading, and a connected series of tents for decontaminating and identifying bodies.

The next-generation remains-transfer case would be heavily insulated and actively cooled to hamper decomposition while bodies are airlifted back to the United States.

The Army wants to keep the cost of the new case, now under development, to less than $2,000 each. More than 5,000 of the current, unlined aluminum cases are now in the service’s inventory. If approved, the transfer-case program would have an estimated cost of $13 million, spread over the next five years.

The service expects to field a $60 million-plus mobile integrated remains-collection system — a temporary, transportable morgue — next year. The program will provide 117 of the mobile systems, Green said, each of which can carry the remains of 16 people in its refrigerated storage area, but still fold up to fit inside a C-130 airplane’s cargo bay.