It is certainly a weird time to be alive right now, and many people alive right now are beginning to think that they’ll be dead soon!?

A story getting a considerable amount of attention today involves the United States Army practicing something it hasn’t had to do on a large scale since the Korean War: digging mass battlefield graves. According to Newsweek, soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, recently participated in exercises designed to prepare the military for the possibility of large numbers of casualties during a future conflict. The training, known as Operation Dragon Covenant, involved engineers, medical personnel, chaplains, and specialists responsible for handling the remains of fallen soldiers. The objective was to determine how quickly temporary graves could be prepared while ensuring that the remains could eventually be recovered, identified, and returned to their families.

The numbers involved in the exercise are rather staggering. Using bulldozers and other heavy equipment, soldiers were able to excavate trenches capable of holding 20 bodies in approximately one hour and 15 minutes. Based on those results, the Army estimates that an engineering company operating continuously with the appropriate equipment could prepare and cover temporary graves for as many as 2,400 bodies in a 24-hour period. The military emphasized that these would not be permanent burial sites, but temporary locations until conditions allowed the remains to be returned home. The exercises also included religious personnel who worked to establish procedures for respectfully handling the dead during circumstances in which individual funeral services would simply not be possible.

There is some important context to all of this. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American military superiority and transportation capabilities generally allowed fallen soldiers to be evacuated relatively quickly. However, a future large-scale war involving a powerful adversary could make that process considerably more difficult. The Army says these exercises are intended to prepare for precisely those circumstances, rather than announcing that such a conflict is imminent. Military regulations already permit temporary battlefield burials under certain conditions, and the latest training is designed to modernize those procedures. Nevertheless, the fact that the United States military is actively preparing for a scenario involving casualties on this scale, something it has not needed to implement extensively in more than seven decades, is certainly attracting attention.

And perhaps that attention is being magnified by everything else happening around us. Governments across the planet have been issuing increasingly prominent emergency preparedness warnings, encouraging citizens to maintain at least three days, and in some countries considerably more, of food, water, and essential supplies. While much of that guidance is intended for disasters and disruptions of all kinds, the timing is difficult to ignore. Meanwhile, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has publicly criticized the Trump administration following a briefing on potential renewed military attacks against Iran, describing the plans as insane and warning of devastating escalation. With the American midterm elections taking place next week, perhaps some of this tension is very American-centric, but the rest of the globe appears to be watching as well. There seems to be an uneasiness everywhere. You can see it in the faces of TikTok streamers, YouTubers, and ordinary people trying to make sense of the headlines. None of these developments necessarily means something catastrophic is about to happen, and emergency preparedness warnings are certainly nothing new. But when you begin putting all these stories together, the atmosphere feels different. It’s a strange time, and it’s a tense time.