The national defense strategy renews focus on great power competition and conventional warfare. Casualty evacuation and treatment needs to focus on great power confrontation, too.
Can casualty evacuation honed to a high degree of success through
American counter-insurgency campaigns (although Afghanistan lagged Iraq)
succeed in getting casualties to medical care in a conventional war environment
without a permissive evacuation environment and with a volume of
patients we haven't seen in a long time?
That may require extending the
"Golden hour" to medical care to a period our system can handle rather
than trying to make the system meet that time standard.
Seriously, if patients are moved to medical care to meet the time standard when they should be stabilized first even if they make it to medical care in longer than an hour, that's the right thing to do.
So I hope
we use good data on what the Golden hour actually means.
About Me
- Brian J. Dunn
- I live and write in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan AB and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. Former American history instructor and retired nonpartisan research analyst. I write on Blogger and Substack. Various military and private journals have published my occasional articles on military subjects. See "My Published Works" on the TDR web version or under the mobile version drop-down menu for citations and links.
