According to the National Museum of Naval Aviation: “In the days of the Civil War, 1861-1865, some soldiers going into combat improvised their own identification, pinning slips of paper with name and home address to the backs of their coats, stenciling identification on their knapsacks or scratching it in the soft lead backing of the Army belt buckle.”(https://www.armydogtags.com/dog-tag-history/) This quote goes to show that, before dog tags, no actual uniformed way of identifying fallen soldiers was deemed a necessity. Later on in the same article, it is explained that without an actual identification more than one hundred fifty thousand of the fallen were “unidentified”. Dog tags nowadays have your EDIPI written on them instead of your SSN for security purposes but it doesn’t change the fact that it still does what it’s supposed