Discord hobbles mission to locate war dead, report says

The Pentagon’s efforts to recover Americans missing from past wars are fragmented, overlap and are hampered by interagency disputes — inefficiencies that threaten a congressional mandate to identify 200 missing service members by 2015, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.

The Defense Department has averaged 72 identifications a year, while more than 83,000 Americans remain missing. Of those, between 25,000 and 35,000 are estimated to be recoverable.

Among the agencies that are part of the recovery effort is the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which was earmarked to receive $312 million in additional funding from 2012 through 2016 to reach the 200-person accounting goal, the GAO said.

The report, released Wednesday, said "top-level leadership attention" is needed to resolve long-standing challenges.

"DoD’s capability and capacity to accomplish its missing persons accounting mission is being undermined by long-standing leadership weaknesses and a fragmented organizational structure," the GAO found.

The undersecretary of defense for policy and the U.S. Pacific Command — to which the Hawaii-based JPAC reports — have not been able to resolve disagreements among accounting community members, the GAO said.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, recommended that the secretary of defense reorganize the accounting community.

The Defense Department agreed, saying it will consider a range of options, including "consolidation" of the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C., with JPAC, which is headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

The GAO report comes on the heels of an internal JPAC efficiency report that harshly criticized "military tourism" trips to Europe by JPAC staffers as extravagances that included luxury hotels and fine dining.

The internal report, researched in 2010, described aspects of JPAC as dysfunctional — a charge still leveled today by some staffers who complain that interdepartmental rivalries interfere with the recovery mission.

JPAC referred questions to the Pentagon.

The past commander of JPAC, retired Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom, said last week he rejected the internal report, written by Paul M. Cole, because it was incomplete and it included personal attacks. Cole is a political economist on a fellowship at JPAC.

Others have characterized it as being flavored by the power struggles that exist within JPAC.

U.S. Rep. Colleen Hana­busa, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter co-signed by a bipartisan group of congressional members to JPAC’s current commander, Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague, asking about the allegations in the Cole report and requesting an armed services committee briefing.

"These findings are of great concern to us given the importance of JPAC’s mission. We owe it to our service members and the families of missing service members to have a well-functioning command, above reproach," Hanabusa wrote.

DPMO is responsible for policy, control and oversight of the missing persons accounting program, while JPAC investigates, recovers and identifies war dead, the GAO said.

Other agencies in the remains recovery chain include the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and the Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory.

JPAC indicated that disinterments of war dead buried as unknowns are expected to make up a "substantial source" of new identifications, but expressed uncertainty as to whether there would be widespread support within the Defense Department, the GAO said.

As an example of reluctance, JPAC reported that a request to disinter remains marked as unknown from the Dec. 7, 1941, loss of life on the battleship USS Oklahoma was denied by the Navy.

According to the Navy, there are 377 Oklahoma sailors buried as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.