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Concept
Missing in action
Summary
Missing in action (MIA) is a casualty classification assigned to combatants, military chaplains, combat medics, and prisoners of war who are reported missing during wartime or ceasefire. They may have been killed, wounded, captured, executed, or deserted. If deceased, neither their remains nor grave have been positively identified. Becoming MIA has been an occupational risk for as long as there has been warfare.
Until around 1912, service personnel in most countries were not routinely issued with ID tags. As a result, if someone was killed in action and their body was not recovered until much later, there was often little or no chance of identifying the remains unless the person in question was carrying items that would identify them, or had marked their clothing or possessions with identifying information. Starting around the time of the First World War, nations began to issue their service personnel with purpose-made identification tags. These were usually made of some form of lightweight metal such as aluminium. However, in the case of the British Army the material chosen was compressed fiber, which was not very durable. Although wearing identification tags proved to be highly beneficial, the problem remained that bodies could be completely destroyed (ranging from total body disruption to outright vaporization), burned or buried by the type of high-explosive munitions routinely used in modern warfare or in destructions of vehicles. Additionally, the combat environment itself could increase the likelihood of missing combatants such as jungle warfare, or submarine warfare, or aircraft crashes in remote mountainous terrain, or at sea. Alternatively, there could be administrative errors; the actual location of a temporary battlefield grave could be misidentified or forgotten due to the "fog of war". Finally, since military forces had no strong incentive to keep detailed records of enemy dead, bodies were frequently buried (sometimes with their identification tags) in temporary graves, the locations of which were often lost or obliterated e.
Official source
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