POW/MIA Accounting

Volume I – Searching for America's Missing Servicemen in the Soviet Union

Paul M. Cole

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9789811071270
• eBook ISBN: 9789811071287
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is an insider's account of the search for missing American servicemen who became trapped in the Soviet Union and the US government's efforts to free them or discover their fates.The book, which is based on years of work as a consultant to the US government, includes archive research that took place in Russia and fourother republics of the Soviet Union as the USSR broke apart. Volume I explores the history of missing American servicemen, with particular emphasis on thousands who were not accounted for during the Korean War and Cold War era. As US relations with Russia and North Korea becomemore intense, this book is an extremely timely resource for scholars, laymen, and policymakers.

© The Author(s) 2018

Paul M. ColePOW/MIA Accountinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7128-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Authorization, Policy, Implementation, and Oversight

Paul M. Cole¹

(1)

Nashville, TN, USA

End Abstract

Origins

Since its beginning in the nineteenth century, the primary purpose of the US government’s inchoate accounting program has been to secure the live return of service members whose casualty status was prisoner of war (POW) or missing in action (MIA).

In cases when live return did not occur, if no evidence of life was produced over a period of one year and one day after the date of the loss event, a presumptive finding of death could be made under the terms of the Missing Persons Act. Congress has designated all service members and civilians who have been declared dead, regardless of any previous casualty status, as missing persons.

In 2010, Congress created a second accounting program. The legacy program to resolve missing person cases associated with recent or concurrent conflicts was re-authorized status quo ante. A second program was specifically authorized to account for missing persons associated with America’s historic conflicts, aka “pre-enactment” cases. The purpose of the second accounting program is to “account for” missing persons in a four-step process: locate, recover, identify the remains of missing persons, and then return the remains to the next of kin. No time limit, deadline, sunset clause, or definition of success was imposed by Congress on either of the accounting programs.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the origins of the accounting program. Particular attention is focused on the policies intended to implement the program authorized to account for service members who went missing during America’s historic conflicts.

* * *

Authorization and Policy

The US government’s program to account for service members who went missing during America’s historic conflicts consists of politics, authorization, policy, and an implementation plan, all of which are subject to Congressional oversight. Authority to carry out the accounting program cascades through the federal government in the following manner:

• Politics is the process by which opposing individuals and groups compete to exert control over the federal government.

  • The composition of the Congress, that is, the distribution of the party affiliations of the members of the House and Senate, reflects the balance of national political power at any given time.
  • Congress is empowered by the Constitution to make and amend policies that apply to the federal agencies, such as the DoD , that provide services in support of the accounting program.
• Authorization for the accounting program is expressed by Congress primarily through the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA ).

  • The NDAA, which authorizes federal agencies to provide services described in the Act, defines terms, sets objectives, establishes priorities, and states the results the federal agencies are expected to produce. For example:
• Congress, which assigned DoD the authority to account for servicemen who went missing during America’s historic conflicts, defined the term “historic conflicts.”
• Congress defined the term “accounted for” in the NDAA. The definition includes the criteria and methods authorized to “account for” the missing that are binding on the federal government.

  • Congress creates allocation authority required to fund the activities authorized by the NDAA through an appropriations bill. If there is no appropriations bill, aka a “budgtet,” the government may be funded through a continuing resolution, aka a “CR.”
• Policy is a government agency’s high-level course of action as well as a statement of the principles that guide a particular program.

  • DoD’s policy for the accounting program is promulgated by the Secretary of Defense through the DoD Issuances Program.¹
  • The president has the authority to create policy for the Executive Branch by issuing Executive Order s or signing Executive Agreement s that apply to the entire government.
  • The appearance of policy may be created by statements by senior officials.
  • When agencies fail to create policy in an environment of weak or non-existent Congressional oversight, de facto policy can be created through “regulatory capture .”
• An implementation plan, that is, the “how to” part, explains the process and procedures and assigns responsibility within the DoD to achieve the objectives described in the agency’s policy.

  • DoD is responsible for the formulation and execution of the implementation plan to account for servicemen who went missing during America’s historic conflicts.
  • Congress is responsible for the oversight of DoD’s performance, which includes the review, monitoring, and supervision of the programs, activities, and results of the implementation plan undertaken by DoD.
  • Congress exerts its oversight authority through the committee and subcommittee system. In the case of the accounting program, oversight is usually the responsibility of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

A policy that is implemented without effective oversight can go off the rails quickly. Without proper oversight, the program intended to implement the policy inevitably falls victim to “mission creep.” Mission creep occurs when superfluous and unnecessary tasks are added to a project. If this goes on long enough, a bloated policy begins to appear normal, simply because everyone has forgotten what was authorized to implement the original policy in the first place. From time to time, mission creep causes the project to spiral so far out of control that even Congress notices.

In addition to the authority to establish, modify, or terminate the accounting program, Congress has the authority to create the Accounting Community and to define its members. The Accounting Community is significant because its participants are the only organizations authorized by Congress to participate in the accounting program.

* * *

After Congress passes the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Department of Defense (DoD) implements Congressional intent through two documents. The first is a DoD Directive (DoDD ) that establishes DoD policy on a general level. The nitty-gritty details that describe who is responsible to do what to achieve the objectives included in a DoDD are presented in a DoD Instruction (DoDI ). (For every DoDD there is at least one and in some cases multiple DoDI’s.)

DoD policy has been silent on the issue of how to recover physical and biological evidence in order to fulfill the Congressional definition of “accounted for.”

DoDD 5110.10, Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Office (DPMO)

Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Office (DPMO) (Issued July 16, 1993, updated September 21, 2005) contains no implementation plan or guidance.

DoDI 2310.05, Accounting for Missing Persons—Boards of Inquiry

Accounting for Missing Persons Boards of Inquiry (Issued January 31, 2000, updated March 14, 2008) establishes policy for the “review of new information that may change the status of or significantly contribute to resolving the fate of a person who is unaccounted for from the Korean conflict, the Cold War, or the Indochina War era.” Enclosure 8, which establishes policy for these cases, deals entirely with information and document management. This DoDI contains no guidance or regulations concerning how the information and documents are to be obtained or who is responsible for producing the information and documents. Instead, DoDI 2310.05 establishes policies on how to convene a “Pre-Enactment Case Board” if information that is new and credible is received. DoDI 2301.05 does not contain the term “fullest possible accounting.”

DoDD 3002.01, Personnel Recovery in the Department of Defense

Personnel Recovery in the Department of Defense (December 22, 2013), which replaced DoDD 2310.2 (2000), contains no policy concerning how to locate or recover the remains of missing servicemen.

DoDD 5110.10, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA)

Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) (January 13, 2017) created a “Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Program” that “under the authority, direction, and control of the USD(P),” the Director, DPAA “Establishes policies and procedures to account for DoD personnel who had been reported in a missing status, as prescribed by DoDI 1300.18 or other contemporary Military Department regulation, from past conflicts and other designated conflicts, including locating, recovering and identifying remains after hostilities have ceased.” DoDD 5110.10 authorizes DPAA to establish “procedures” to account for the missing but more importantly establishes political not scientific control and oversight over the science of human skeletal identification as well as political authority over the forensic science required to locate and recover remains. There is no reference to federal policy, and the term “fullest possible accounting” does not appear in DoDD 5110.10. The DoDD does not include any quantitative measures by which the progress of the accounting program could be assessed.

In 2017, the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Agency (DPAA) stated:

Our vision: A world-class workforce fulfills our nation’s obligation by maximizing the number of missing personnel accounted for while ensuring timely, accurate information is provided to their families.

Our mission: Provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.

The DoD Directive 5110.10 that created DPAA does not assign DPAA the mission to “provide fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.” The term “fullest possible accounting” is not defined by federal law, policy, or regulation, and DPAA does not define the term either in any publication.

The fact that DPAA was permitted to create its own mission with no defined goal or quantifiable objectives is a textbook example of mission creep that was made possible by the absence of Congressional oversight. This was not the only unusual feature of the US government’s approach to accounting for missing American service members.

* * *

Inherent Responsibility or Man-Made Obligation

If the requirement to account for combatants who went missing during wartime by recovering human remains is an inherent obligation of the government, the practice should be found in a variety of countries around the world. The majority of nations that have been involved in major wars that resulted in tens of thousands of casualties, however, do not account for the missing by searching for human remains. In Aristotelian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Authorization, Policy, Implementation, and Oversight
• 2. The Accounting Program: Locate, Recover, Identify, and Return
• 3. Political Interference with Science
• 4. Exploitation of the Missing
• 5. Accounting for the Korean War Missing
• 6. To Moscow via Stockholm and Helsinki
• 7. Pentagon Briefing, Lunch with a KGB General
• 8. Congressional and DoD Action
• 9. Russia’s Involvement in POW/MIA Affairs
• 10. US-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs
• 11. Archive Research Follow-On Project
• 12. Final Project Briefing and RAND Report Published
• 13. Moscow, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and East Germany
• 14. “Evil Creeps,” Conspiracy Theorists, and DPMO’s Activities
• 15. Findings and Conclusions
• Back Matter