US Medics Must Learn from Ukraine’s Harsher War, Report Says – By Sam Skove (Defense One) / May 18, 2023
Russia’s artillery and jammers make battlefield medicine harder and more dangerous than in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Dima, a Ukrainian mortician-turned-medic, knows all too well how dangerous medical evacuations can be. Speaking to Defense One near Kherson last November, he described how Russian tanks once fired on his ambulance, sending shrapnel through its thin sides.
Dima’s experience is far from unusual, according to a new report that describes the experience of frontline Ukrainian special forces surgeons. Published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, it says the U.S. should get ready for wars defined by artillery, not the homemade bombs seen in Afghanistan.
“If you look at what the next war is gonna be, every incident is going to be a mass-casualty incident,” Aaron Epstein, a doctor and president of the group that produced the report, said in an interview.
The U.S. military’s medical community needs to figure out, among other things, how to treat casualties amid ever-more-accurate artillery strikes, how to deal with electronic jamming, and how to ward off attacks on medical vehicles, the report said.
