Battlefield medicine, also known as field surgery and later combat casualty care, is the treatment of wounded combatants and non-combatants in or near an area of combat. Civilian medicine has been greatly advanced by procedures that were first developed to treat the wounds inflicted during combat. With the advent of advanced procedures and medical technology, even polytrauma can be survivable in modern wars. Battlefield medicine is a category of military medicine.

In 1989, the Commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command (NAVSPECWARCOM) established a research program to conduct studies on medical and physiologic issues. The research concluded that extremity hemorrhage was a leading cause of preventable death in the battlefield. At that time, proper care and treatment was not provided immediately which often resulted in death. This insight prompted a systematic reevaluation of all aspects of battlefield trauma care that was conducted from 1993 to 1996 as a joint effort by special operations medical personnel and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Through this 3-year research, the first version of the TCCC guidelines were created to train soldiers to provide effective intervention on the battlefield. The TCCC aims to combine good medicine with good small-unit tactics. One very important aspect that the TCCC outlined was the use of tourniquets, initially there was a belief that the use of tourniquets led to the preventable loss of an extremity due to ischemia but after careful literature search the committee arrived at the conclusion that there was not enough information out there to confirm this claim. The TCCC therefore outline the appropriate usage of tourniquets to provide effective first aid on the battlefield.

After the TCCC article was published in 1996, the program undertook 4 parallel efforts during the next 5-year period. These efforts are as follows:

Over the past decade combat medicine has improved drastically. Everything has been given a complete overhaul from the training to the gear. In 2011, all enlisted military medical training for the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Army were located under one command, the Medical Education and Training Campus (METC). After attending a basic medical course there (which is similar to a civilian EMT course), the students go on to advanced training in Tactical Combat Casualty Care.

Tactical combat casualty care is becoming the standard of care for the tactical management of combat casualties within the Department of Defense and is the sole standard of care endorsed by both the American College of Surgeons and the National Association of EMT's for casualty management in tactical environments.

Tactical combat casualty care is built around three definitive phases of casualty care:

Since "90% of combat deaths occur on the battlefield before the casualty ever reaches a medical treatment facility" (Col. Ron Bellamy) TCCC focuses training on major hemorrhaging and airway complications such as a tension-pneumothorax. This has driven the casualty fatality rate down to less than 9%.

Listed below are interventions that a TCCC provider may be expected to perform depending on the phase of TCCC they are at and their level of training. This list is not comprehensive and may be subject to change with future revisions in TCCC guidelines.