Posted on: Wednesday, July 9, 2003
Military to merge POW/MIA search units
By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer
The two Hawai'i-based military units that investigate, recover and identify the nation's missing war dead are merging.
As of Oct.1, Joint Task Forcei Full Accounting at Camp Smith and the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawai'i at Hickam Air Force Base will be known as the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
The merger will combine the 250 people and a $21 million annual budget of the central identification lab with the 155 people and $40 million budget of JTF-FA, officials said.
A location is being sought on O'ahu for consolidated operations. For the next several years, the joint command will continue to operate out of Camp Smith and Hickam.
Army Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, a spokesman for JTF-FA, said the merger would not dilute search and recovery efforts for 78,000 U.S. service members missing from World War II; 8,800 from the Korean War; 100 from the Cold War, and 1,874 from the Vietnam War.
"We're not doing this to save money or take away from the mission," O'Hara said. "We're really doing this to create efficiencies on the operational level, based in part because one commander will be the commander of the worldwide effort."
JTF-FA was created in 1992 to account for Americans missing from the war in Southeast Asia. The central identification lab, started in 1973, has a broader mission of searching for missing U.S. service personnel from World War II, the Korean War, Cold War and Vietnam War.
"We need all of the sections, because what Joint Task Force was mostly about was analysis and investigation, and what CILHI is mostly about is recovery and identification," O'Hara said. "So we're pretty complementary organizations."
The two units often teamed up on Vietnam War cases. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz initiated the review that led to the merger.
Speaking before the House International Relations Committee on June 26, Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, said "merging of the two units under a single command is operationally sound and will clearly demonstrate our government's commitment to our unaccounted-for citizens."
