The University of Hawaii and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency have officially entered into a new partnership agreement.
The two already have worked together, sharing various resources and research. But the five-year agreement signed Tuesday creates a formal framework that will give UH students and faculty access to the DPAA’s facilities and data collections for research, while DPAA will be able to call on UH’s own faculty, students and research to help it in its mission to find and identify the remains of missing service members from past conflicts.
UH President Wendy Hensel said that “this collaboration is built on a foundation of existing work between UH and DPAA, work that speaks to the talent and expertise of the dedicated staff, faculty and students, and pretty incredible work that we’ve done together.”
In 1976 the United States Army relocated what was then known as its Central Identification Laboratory to Honolulu.
“That laboratory was modest in scope and utilized rudimentary scientific methods,” DPAA Director Kelly McKeague said. “Because of innovative scientists, cutting-edge technology, that laboratory today is the preeminent human skeletal forensic laboratory in the world, bar none.”
Headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, the agency operates its massive lab from there as well as coordinates a series of searches for fallen service members across the globe. Using a mixture of science and historic detective work, teams work around the world to find the remains of missing service members and bring them to Hawaii, where experts at the lab work to identify them.
Since 2021, DPAA and UH Manoa’s School of Anthropology have been partnering on developing the Cambodian Completion Iniative, a project aimed at helping train and educate Cambodian archaeologists that can assist American teams looking for fallen service members left missing in Cambodia.
McKeague said that, “There are currently two Cambodian students, Cambodian nationals, that are here (in Hawaii) getting their degree in anthropology, that will one day go back to help us with the missing in Cambodia, but also help Cambodia expand its anthropological capacity in country. So the ramifications for both DPAA and UH extend well beyond the state.”
More recently, DPAA worked with UH Manoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine to develop a database of isotopes collected from the Willed Bodies Program to help better identify the remains of Asian American personnel missing from World War II and the Korean war.
“These are powerful examples of how UH’s world-class research and expertise can be applied to real-world challenges and how our work here can have humanitarian impact across the world,” Hensel said. “This is what a partnership should look like. It’s very clearly a true exchange where each side grows stronger, where public institutions and federal agencies inspire the next generations of workers and public service and where together we come to serve a greater good.”
Under the administration of President Donald Trump, the Pentagon has been looking at programs to cut that leaders deem to be distractions from training for war and obtaining new weapons. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a point of visiting DPAA during his first tour of the Pacific when he stopped in Hawaii. He praised the work of the organization and its dedication to identifying fallen service members.
Hensel said that it’s “just important to continue to emphasize the importance of these partnerships formally, especially at a moment when some research funding is at risk, and to say there is high value in the partnerships that we offer across the board.”
McKeague said that “there’s funding, obviously, when we utilize capabilities here in the university, such as that isotope analysis … we pay for that research — as we should — and that research is boding well for results that it’s producing.”
The DPAA estimates that there are over 37,000 missing American service members that it believes are “recoverable.”
McKeague said that “those missing Americans present not just the numbers, but present a challenge because of time and the fact that their remains are exposed to environmental degradation.”
The agency’s teams at times brave difficult, even dangerous conditions. Earlier this year a team recovered remains from Laos in the vicinity of the Battle of Lima Site 85, a secret base the military used during the Vietnam War. Members of the recovery team trained beforehand at the U.S Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center, to move down steep cliffs to get to the remains.
McKeague said that working more closely with UH will help them find answers, and bring closure to the families of the fallen.
“It makes sense from the standpoint that it emboldens the partnerships that we have by having us avail us of the resources and capabilities of the University System, to include the School of Medicine,” McKeague said. “And so by mutual benefit, we at DPAA will benefit because of the capabilities of the university system in helping us find more missing Americans and bringing them home to their families.”
Source: The Garden Island