Prioritize search for MIA remains

In its review of efforts to recover the remains of American service members missing from past wars, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that the agencies in charge of these foreign expeditions need to do a much better job of prioritizing missions based on whether remains are likely to be recovered.

The GAO’s highly critical report, released last July, noted that while the Department of Defense has developed standards to rank efforts to retrieve remains of soldiers missing from the Vietnam War, it had not done so for conflicts dating back to World War II. Among the GAO’s nine recommendations was one urging the DOD officials "to establish criteria that can be used to prioritize missing-persons cases to reflect feasibility of recovery, in order to better allocate resources … "

In other words, as important as these far-flung efforts continue to be, even 70 years after World War II, money, manpower and other resources are not limitless. Nor should they be, when the government agencies charged with these tasks — collectively known as the accounting community — have been found by the GAO and other investigations to be discordant, dysfunctional and prone to embarking on ill-defined recovery missions that cost a lot and produce little.

Millions of dollars worth of waste and fraud within the Hawaii branch of this community, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, were brought to light by whistleblower Paul M. Cole, a scientific fellow who has since been fired from his job at JPAC. Cole was one catalyst for reform, spurring calls for action at the highest levels; a reorganization of the agency and related departments on the mainland is ongoing. Cole’s claims of retaliation are plausible and he is right to seek every remedy regarding his dismissal.

Now comes confirmation that the DOD is investigating JPAC for spending $8 million to $12 million to construct a 3.4-mile gravel road leading to a World War II battle site in swampy terrain in Papua New Guinea, when it’s not clear how many missing American service members can be recovered. Neither JPAC nor the Pentagon would say precisely how much it cost U.S. army engineers to construct the short route through a perennial flood plain; the road was finished in December. The mission’s expenditures, of course, will rise much higher with the actual recovery efforts, which are not part of the road-construction bill.

This mission’s goal is undeniably noble, but the complexity of the site, in both geography and the dispersement of human remains, makes for an uncertain recovery effort. This effort warrants a careful assessment of exactly how this money is being spent and toward what realistic outcomes.

American, Australian and Japanese soldiers all fought and died around the Papuan Peninsula battle site known as Huggins Roadblock. The carnage there in late 1942 was desperate, with survivors documenting what amounted to hand-to-hand combat. The remains of fewer than 60 Americans, 150 Australians and an unknown number of Japanese were never recovered. The exact number of U.S. remains is unknown, and how many are recoverable and identifiable is even murkier.

"Bottom line, we do not know how many (American) remains are located at Huggins Roadblock and we will not know until we put a shovel in the ground and dig," one JPAC official said in an email.

When it costs up to $12 million to even put a shovel in the ground, the Pentagon must ask the tough questions.