The Pentagon agency that recovers missing American war dead said it is proceeding at a record pace with about 100 identifications made nearly eight months into the fiscal year.

Disinterments of Dec. 7, 1941, USS Oklahoma sailors buried as “unknowns” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl have yielded 30 of those IDs, said the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Next to be exhumed from Punchbowl will be about 100 Marine Corps and Navy casualties from the 1943 Battle of Tarawa, also buried as unknowns, the agency said.

“The request to disinter the Tarawa unknowns at the Punchbowl is still going through the approval process,” the DPAA said in an email. “Once approved, the plan is to systematically conduct the disinterments over the next year and complete identification soon after.”

The DPAA, with the bulk of its operations at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, made 80 IDs during fiscal 2015, which ended Sept. 30.

“We’re excited about how we are doing, and the direction the agency is going,” the DPAA said Tuesday. A reorganization of the effort put in place by the Pentagon created new processes and protocols “that are allowing us to perform at a heightened (record) level,” it said.

“The current pace on IDs will put us far above any other year for the accounting community as a whole,” the DPAA said. The agency in November predicted it would make 200 or more identifications for the entire fiscal year.

Some members of Congress strongly criticized the predecessor organization of the DPAA in recent years when it became clear it would not make 200 identifications annually as mandated by lawmakers.

Increasingly, part of the total will come by identifying unknowns at Punchbowl, while overseas missions to recover MIAs continue to locations including Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and Europe.

The DPAA previously said that after the Tarawa unknown recoveries at Punchbowl, it was looking at disinterring more than 40 unknown service members at the cemetery from fighting in Buna, Papua New Guinea, and several hundred more, mostly Army soldiers, who died in 1945 as captives on the Japanese “hell ship” Enoura Maru.

The DPAA also said it was researching Dec. 7, 1941, Punchbowl unknowns from ships including the West Virginia, California, Nevada and Maryland, as well as the 1944 West Loch disaster and more than 3,000 Americans buried in Manila. Improved technology including DNA advances allows the U.S. military to make the identifications more than seven decades later.

In November the DPAA recovered the last of 388 sailors and Marines from the battleship USS Oklahoma at Punchbowl. The agency recently announced the identification of two crew members, Chief Petty Officer Albert E. Hayden, 44, of Mechanicsville, Md., and Chief Storekeeper Herbert J. Hoard, 36, of DeSoto, Mo.

Hayden will be buried today in Morganza, Md. The Calvert (Md.) Recorder newspaper reported recently that letters to the editor suggested a new elementary school be named after Hayden.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Ronnie Kissinger, a cousin of Hayden, was quoted as saying about the idea. The fallen Oklahoma sailor “should have something named after him. We’re just so proud to be part of this history.”

Life Magazine reported that Hayden was the first Marylander to die in World War II, the newspaper said. Hoard, meanwhile, will be buried in Missouri on Saturday.

“The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s mission is to provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel from past conflicts to their families and the nation,” the organization said on its website. In 2015 the DPAA had a budget of $130.6 million.

A recent review showed that 82,732 Americans remain unaccounted from past wars, including 73,161 from World War II, 7,818 from the Korean War, 1,621 from the Vietnam War, 126 from the Cold War and six from Iraq and other conflicts.