McCaskill, Ayotte Want Changes to MIA Program

[Tx4obama]

McCASKILL, AYOTTE WANT CHANGES TO MIA PROGRAM. Something’s gotta give in the ineffective Pentagon program to find 83,000 missing troops from World War II, Vietnam and Korea, Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said Thursday. They’re pushing for a leadership change, Morning Defense author Juana Summers reports: “McCaskill … wanted to ‘give a loud wake-up call to everyone involved that it is time to put your squabbles aside for the good of the mission and the good of our nation.’ ... 'What bothered me most was reading about the petty squabbling between the three agencies in which each of you has been charged with leadership,’ Ayotte said. … Maj. Gen. W. Montague Winfield, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for POW and missing personnel affairs, said Thursday the Pentagon’s inspector general will investigate ‘the allegations of fraud, waste and abuse’ … The program came under new scrutiny after The Associated Press revealed an internal Pentagon study that described JPAC as inept, mismanaged and even, at times, corrupt. The study was suppressed by JPAC’s previous leaders.”
http://www.politico.com/proreport/0813/proreport11314.html

Pentagon to probe alleged waste, fraud in MIA unit

Aug 1, 4:23 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon is investigating alleged waste and misuse of taxpayer dollars by a military-led unit responsible for finding, recovering and identifying U.S. service members missing in action from past conflicts.

The investigation was disclosed Thursday at a Senate hearing held in response to an Associated Press story revealing an internal Pentagon report that said the search for soldiers' remains on foreign battlefields by the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command was inept, mismanaged, wasteful and dysfunctional.

Shortly after the AP report July 7, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, issued a report saying the MIA accounting effort was hampered by weak leadership, infighting and a fragmented approach to planning. The report recommended a more streamlined chain of command and other organizational changes.

Together the reports prompted calls in Congress for action to ensure that the government live up to its pledge to account for as many MIAs as possible - a mission for which the public has spent tens of millions a year.

-snip-

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MIAS_IN_LIMBO?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-08-01-16-23-05

[MADem]

1. I do think it is important to clarify that the people actually doing the work,

both in the field and administratively, divvied up amongst the personnel 'directorates' of the assorted services, are not at fault, here. The problem is leadership and a fractured chain of command.

The people who are pushing paper serve two or three masters. The people who are looking for bodies answer to a half dozen or more. The only way to streamline this is to create a more singular command entity--the problem, as always, is how Congress and OLA process the paperwork. I think the "personnel" leadership will get irritated at being cut out of the process, but that probably needs to happen. If they receive a request for assistance directly, they need to send it to OLA, let the person who sent it know where it is, and OLA needs to farm it out to a centralized MIA command.

Right now, each service has a little "office" and they are separate from the people in the field actually doing the the searching. There's too much 'mail' going on, even if a lot of it is e-mail. Everything is slowed down as a consequence. Put it all under one purple suited unified umbrella that sends out a status report regularly, and cut all the other people with their fingers in the pie out of the equation. It will save money, reduce billets at the HQ level, and things will happen faster, too.