The Pentagon is
overhauling its efforts to find and identify missing service members from past
wars, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Monday.
The changes address
the problems laid out in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, including outdated scientific methods, overlapping bureaucracy,
a risk-averse disinterment policy for the 9,400 unknowns buried around the world,
and poor laboratory management that inhibited the mission.
“The time has come
for a paradigm shift,” said Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Michael Lumpkin, who headed up a 30-day review of the mission Hagel ordered in
February.
One of the bigger
changes involves the military’s failure to embrace DNA. Our investigation
detailed how the Pentagon identification effort relegated DNA to only a confirmation
tool, rather than using it to lead the process as is now done in other
countries.
Using a DNA-led
process is “absolutely something we’re going to move toward,” Lumpkin said.
The Pentagon will
“break away from the way of traditionally doing business…that didn’t fully
embrace progressive science,” he said.
The Pentagon
spends about $100 million a year on the MIA mission, yet it solves surprisingly
few cases. Last year, the military identified just 60 service members out of
the about 83,000 Americans missing from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The lackluster efforts have been subjected to intense Congressional scrutiny and media coverage, including holding fake arrival ceremonies and mismanaging overseas excavations.
In restructuring
the mission, the Pentagon is eliminating the two main agencies — the
Hawaii-based Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command and the
Washington-based Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office — and
creating a new single agency. There will be one chain of command and one
budget.
“We’re
streamlining everything,” Hagel said.
The reorganization
“resolves issues of duplication and inefficiency” and makes the effort “more
transparent and responsive” to families, he said. The changes will be
implemented over the next 18 months.
Although it’s
unclear at this point what positions and personnel will be eliminated besides
the commanders of JPAC and DPMO, Lumpkin insisted the as-yet-unnamed agency will be a “fundamentally new organization.”
“It’s not business
as usual,” he said.
The restructuring
pushes aside J-PAC’s scientific director, Tom Holland, who has held the
position for 19 years. As ProPublica and NPR detailed, Holland has had nearly
total control of each step in the identification process. That job will now be handled by an Armed
Forces Medical Examiner.
The move appears
meant to address the fact that sign-offs on the lab’s decisions were little
more than a rubber stamp. Putting a medical examiner at the head of the
process — someone who is scientifically knowledgeable — ensures “the
opportunity for rubber stamping doesn’t exist,” Lumpkin said.
Outsiders and
former J-PAC officials said the changes were promising.
“I think the Armed
Forces Medical Examiners are probably as well suited to do that as anyone else
I could think of,” said Mark Leney, a former JPAC anthropologist who now teaches
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
“Selecting a
scientific leader with a track record of working in an interdisciplinary
scientific environment, preferably someone who has managed a large group of
diverse technical and scientific experts before, will be key to making this
work,” Leney said.
Hagel also
announced a plan to develop public-private partnerships to “leverage
capabilities” of nongovernmental groups who work on recovering and identifying
MIAs – we which included last month in a rundown of potential ways
to fix the effort. “I think that would be a waste if we
didn’t do that,” Lumpkin said.
ProPublica and NPR
also reported that under Holland’s leadership the lab rejected 96 percent of potential
disinterments of unknown servicemembers, despite DNA advances that could help
lead to their identification.
Lumpkin said that
policy will be changed, though he had no specifics.
The Pentagon is
also considering a national campaign to collect DNA samples from family members
of the missing.
The restructuring will
create one case management system for all missing persons, which should make it
simpler to conduct research and keep families informed. DPMO and JPAC, long
embroiled in a turf war, have often fought over records, duplicated trips to
the National Archives, and done competing investigations.
“We’re now taking concrete,
enforceable steps to fix what has been a management mess—but as with any
effort to demand accountability, the devil will be in the details and the
implementation,” Senators Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said
in a statement. “So we’re looking forward to working with the Pentagon to
ensure the families of our missing heroes receive nothing less than honesty and
transparency in our efforts to recover their loved
ones.”
