DPAA

From the Stars and Stripes:

"POW/MIA Accounting Agency to speed up remains identification"

The reorganized agency tasked with accounting for the nation’s missing warfighters has improved its communication with family members and boosted cooperation with outside partners to find and retrieve remains, say some advocates involved in the effort. But those observers also wonder whether the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which reached full operational capacity in January, will flounder with the sudden July departure of its first director, Michael Linnington. While DPAA officials say the overhaul and reforms are well-established, critics contend that inefficiencies and lack of transparency still dog the agency. Linnington stayed for only a year, despite repeated promises to families of missing servicemembers that he was in the job for the long haul. “It’s really hard to say what exactly the positives are,” said Ann Mills-Griffiths, chairman of the board for the National League of POW/MIA Families. “Things were in a state of complete flux at the time that Linnington decided to step out.” Although his departure was a “shock,” DPAA can rebound if his replacement “can handle the complexities of this mission,” she said. The reorganized agency has been trying to improve, though “clumsily” so, Mills-Griffiths said. “I think it has the chance of being better,” she said. “Is it better yet? No, it’s still dysfunctional. It still has a lot of work to be done to make it as productive as I think it could be.” In an interview with Stars and Stripes shortly before he left to head the Wounded Warrior Project, Linnington said he believed the new DPAA had strengthened its relationships with families and members of Congress. “I think it’s really been a year of great change and great progress,” he said. “Are we where we need to be? No, I don’t think any organization can ever fully rest and say they’re where they need to be. We still have some processes we need to look at in terms of maturing them to where they can be most effective. I think we need to continue to improve our ability to provide answers to our families of our missing that ask us those questions.” “Over the hump” was how Brig. Gen. Mark Spindler, DPAA’s deputy director, who heads the Hawaii lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, described the agency’s status. “We are focused,” he said. “I think the organization understands the objectives. They understand the mission.” That has not equated to a significant rise in the number of identifications made annually. As of Aug. 8, DPAA has this year identified the remains of 62 missing servicemembers. At that rate, by year’s end, the total would slightly exceed the 100 identifications made in 2015 and 107 made in 2014. “I certainly feel like things are better than they used to be, but things were pretty damn bad,” said Jed Henry, a documentary filmmaker who spearheaded a yearslong quest to repatriate the remains of Army Pvt. 1st Class Lawrence Gordon from an “unknown” grave in France. Henry said DPAA was doing a better job at disinterring and working to identify World War II remains buried as unknowns, which he said had been “virtually impossible” under the management of the three agencies that merged to become DPAA: Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Air Force Life Science Equipment Laboratory. Henry pointed to a successful outcome in the case of John E. Anderson, a World War II sailor who died during the D-Day invasion of 1944 and whose remains ended up in an “unknown” grave at the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, France. With Henry’s help, the Anderson family assembled evidence strongly suggesting the grave belonged to the sailor. The DPAA exhumed the remains and identified them as Anderson in about four months, Henry said, citing briefings he received from Linnington. That was “light-years faster compared to the past,” said Henry, who added that it took about five years for the identification to be made from the time the family became actively involved in the search. Anderson was buried in Minnesota in May. “Until last year, the most disinterments they’ve done in a year was two,” Henry said. “And this year they had a goal of 50 in Europe and 50 in the Pacific. That’s taken a huge step.” Identifying remains from “unknown” gravesites is how the agency intends to reach a 2010 mandate set by Congress for 200 IDs a year, Spindler said. The agency plans to reach that number in the near term by working with outside organizations that often have a niche geographical interest or narrow-but-deep historical knowledge. Among them are History Flight, which specializes in recovering World War II remains, and The BentProp Project, which began by searching for servicemembers killed in Palau, but has expanded. DPAA partnered last year with Archaeologists of the Air, an Italian organization that searches for lost WWII aircraft.  Henry said that general communication with families has improved but credited that to the now-departed director. “Linnington was kind of a soldiers’ general, and he seemed to be very sensitive about remarks about him and other people,” he said. “He was accessible. He called me a couple times. He responded to my emails. He had real answers.” Some families have seen changes for the better at DPAA.Pessimism over Linnington’s untimely departure, however, runs deep. “I think most people felt we had the right people in place, and things were actually going to happen,” Henry said. “But unfortunately, to leave within a year – and while he probably leaves the agency better off than it was before he came in, which is a significant accomplishment – the bad side to that is that whoever comes in next could undo everything he did.”

^ I can not understand why the US Government and the US Military has taken so long (sometimes 70+ years) to finally start to get its act together. There really is no excuse other than a lack of true commitment on the politicians and people who are tasked with identifying the remains. These unknown men and women died while serving their country and the Government and the Military tends to simply forget about their sacrifice or the sacrifice of their families. That is just plain wrong. If Government officials and Military leaders are going to send our men and women around the world to protect us then the least they can do is identify their remains in a timely manner. ^

http://www.stripes.com/news/pow-mia-accounting-agency-to-speed-up-remains-identification-1.423930