Big changes are coming to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, the embattled Hawaii-based military organization that searches for, recovers and identifies missing American war dead around the globe.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Monday that he is overhauling JPAC and other Pentagon accounting units following scathing criticism of the effort as dysfunctional, duplicative and inefficient.
JPAC, which will see its authority diminished, no longer will report to the U.S. Pacific Command and is being reassigned, along with the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C., and parts of the Air Force Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory in San Antonio, to the direct supervision of the undersecretary of defense for policy, Hagel said.
Among other changes:
» The Pentagon will establish a new "defense agency" that combines the three commands. The new agency will be led by a presidentially appointed official and have a general officer as a deputy. All communications with family members of the missing from past wars will be managed by the new agency.
» An armed forces medical examiner working for the new agency will be the sole Defense Department identification authority for past-conflict identifications. That responsibility had been the purview of Tom Holland, JPAC’s scientific director for 19 years, according to joint reporting by ProPublica and National Public Radio.
The new agency will oversee operations of JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam as well as efforts in Omaha, Neb., and Dayton, Ohio.
» The Pentagon will realign its appropriations for the mission into a single budget line.
» To improve the search, recovery and identification process, the Pentagon will implement a centralized database and case management system containing all service members’ information.
» Hagel has directed the Defense Department to develop proposals for expanding public-private partnerships in identifying the missing. Private groups conduct extensive research on missing Americans that is handed over to JPAC but is sometimes not acted on in a timely manner, families have complained.
"These steps will help improve the accounting mission, increase the number of identifications of our missing, provide greater transparency for their families and expand our case file system to include all missing personnel," Hagel said.
He added, "We’re streamlining the organization, the process and the resources. And what that means to families is, first, they will be communicated with clearly, directly, and it will be communications from one central location. That has not been the case."
Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michael Lumpkin told reporters Monday that the department needed a "paradigm shift" away from "outdated, institutionalized thinking."
Using DNA as a primary identification tool is "absolutely something we’re going to move toward," ProPublica reported Lumpkin saying.
JPAC identified 60 service members in 2013, while more than 83,000 Americans remain missing. Of those, between 25,000 and 35,000 are estimated to be recoverable.
Congress required 200 annual identifications by 2015 — a goal JPAC in recent years said it would not be able to meet.
JPAC’s budget was $89 million in 2013, the agency’s commander, Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague, previously testified before Congress. The command has about 500 military and civilian personnel.
ProPublica reported that the changes will be implemented over the next 18 months. Which personnel will be kept at JPAC was unclear Monday.
JPAC referred questions to a Navy commander at the Pentagon, who could not be reached for comment late Monday, Washington time.
Ann Mills-Griffiths, chairwoman of the National League of POW/MIA Families, said, "We are grateful that the secretary took (the issue) seriously. We are waiting to see. I mean, as President Reagan said, ‘Trust but verify.’ But we’re optimistic."
Hagel thanked Mills-Griffiths at Monday’s news conference for her efforts and said they had met in December.
"Her organization deserves credit, as well as the institutions and veterans service organizations that have been key to this effort for many years," Hagel said.
Mills-Griffiths said in a phone interview that the new "defense agency" replacing JPAC and the missing-persons office likely will be headquartered at the new $82 million JPAC headquarters and lab being completed at Hickam, with a "presence" maintained in Washington.
The office was established to provide centralized management of POW/MIA affairs. JPAC conducts operations to investigate, recover and identify human remains.
The Pentagon’s efforts to recover Americans missing from past wars are fragmented, overlap and are hampered by interagency disputes, the Government Accountability Office said in a July report.
The GAO report came 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.
Lynn O’Shea, director of research with the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen, said changing the structure of the accounting community — something that’s been done in the past — won’t fix the system.
"You are not going to solve the problems in those organizations until you change the organizational mindset — and that’s going to require the removal of people, some of whom have been there for 20 or 30 or more years," she said.
At a recent congressional hearing, Adm. Samuel Locklear III, head of U.S. Pacific Command, was asked whether it would be detrimental to have JPAC, which can be used for relationship-building with foreign countries, removed from his command. Locklear said even if JPAC were outside his control, any recovery operations in Asia and the Pacific would have to be coordinated with Pacific Command, "so I don’t see that (removal) as a problem."
