A disagreement between the Navy and the Hawaii-based military command charged with recovering remains of those missing in action comes down to three salient words: Rest in peace.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) wants permission from the Army to exhume all of the Dec. 7, 1941, casualties of the USS Oklahoma buried as "unknowns" at Punchbowl cemetery.
Being able to sort through these remains of more than 330 crew members would, frankly, help the embattled JPAC reach its congressionally mandated yearly ID quota.
But, the Navy is rightly against it, saying the process would take the unknown sailors and Marines "outside the sanctity of the grave." Also, it rightly notes that DNA testing and accounting could take years and still leave some unidentified.
Further, the Navy wants to take the partial and commingled remains of more than 100 — who were unearthed in 2003 from a Punchbowl casket — and reinter them next year at a grave site to be created on Ford Island.
JPAC should leave those already resting on American soil to rest in peace. Instead, it should be putting its priority on bringing home those who died on foreign battlefields.
"Identifying the remains of unknowns already recovered and buried with honor in U.S. national cemeteries at home and abroad must take a lower priority" than recovering Americans "that still lie in the foreign countries in which they fell," Robert Newberry, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs rightly wrote in a 2009 memo.
As many as 83,000 service members are missing from World War II, and 35,000 from the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Of those, 35,000 are estimated as recoverable. More than 8,500 from World War II are interred in U.S. military cemeteries worldwide; 2,009 from World War II and 810 from the Korean War are buried as "unknowns" at Punchbowl’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
JPAC is among Defense Department agencies that are part of the recovery mission. However, an internal Pentagon report obtained by The Associated Press last month called the efforts "so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from dysfunction to total failure."
The report was ordered by Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom, then head of JPAC, and is troubling because of recent research and analysis capabilities by scientists at JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
In response to those scientific advances, Congress ordered the Pentagon three years ago to achieve 200 identifications of war remains per year by 2015 with earmarked funding of $312 million. At that point, the Pentagon had managed an average of 72 identifications per year. Air Force Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague, commander of JPAC, told a Senate committee this month that a more realistic possibility is 125 IDs per year by 2018.
In a report last month, the Government Accountability Office criticized interagency disputes for hindering the sacred mission of remains recovery. The Defense Department has agreed to consider a range of options, such as consolidating JPAC with the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office at the Pentagon. Such a consolidation makes sense.
U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, was right in a letter to McKeague that Americans "owe it to our service members and the families of missing service members to have a well-functioning command, above reproach."
JPAC’s current push to exhume remains at Punchbowl to boost its ID count — causing the Navy to push back — does not seem to serve that ideal.
