Air Force Staff Sgt. James Dennis cleans a wet screen filter in Laos, May 20, 2025, during a mission for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. (Stephen Holland/Marine Corps)
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — The defense agency that accounts for the nation’s missing warfighters identified the remains of 231 service members in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, far exceeding its tally in recent years.
“Fiscal year 2025 was a record year for us, really a tremendous result,” Capt. Meghan Bodnar, deputy director for operations for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, said Tuesday at the agency’s lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
New DNA techniques, maturing projects and higher funding in prior years are factors in the agency’s record-breaking year, according to Bodnar.
The agency in recent years has failed to reach its annual target of 200 identifications. It accounted for 172 service members in fiscal year 2024. It identified 158 in 2023 and 166 in 2022.
Those tallies are tiny compared to the vast number of service members still unaccounted for according to the DPAA web site: 71,806 from World War II, 7,386 from the Korean War and 1,566 from the Vietnam War.
Eight of the remains identified in the last fiscal year were from the Vietnam War, roughly double the number in recent years.
“We haven’t had as many identifications from Vietnam since fiscal year 2018, so it was a really big year for us,” Bodnar said.
The uptick in overall identifications resulted first from several long-term identification projects maturing and become more efficient, she said.
Most of these projects included methodical disinterment of service members buried as unknowns.
The Korean War Project, for example, saw a 75% increase in identifications from fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2025, she said.
DPAA in 2022 began exhuming the graves of unknown service members associated with the Enoura Maru, a Japanese ship that was carrying 1,619 POWs from the Philippines, via Taiwan, to Japan in 1945.
Some POWs died during an Allied air attack as the ship neared Taiwan, with others dying as the crippled ship made its way to Japan.
DPAA identified 20 Enoura Maru unknowns this past fiscal year compared to only one the previous year, Bodnar said.
Other projects devoted to identifying World War II remains associated with the Solomon Islands, the 1945 Tokyo Prison fire and the prisoner of war Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines are “hitting their stride,” Bodnar said.
DPAA’s effort has also been bolstered by the development of a new DNA processing technique by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab in Delaware.
The process, dubbed SNPs for its focus on identifying genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, greatly expands DPAA’s capacity to match remains to living descendants.
“The result is that we are able to use other branches of family trees for our family reference samples that we previously didn’t have available to us,” Bodnar said.
Thirty identifications in fiscal year 2025 were possible because SNPs was available, she said.
A third reason, according to Bodnar, was increased DPAA funding the past three fiscal years that enabled the agency to field more missions each year, which sent more remains and artifacts to the lab, she said.
With a $185.5 million budget last year, the agency conducted 104 recovery and investigative missions and 30 disinterments, a total of 134, according to an email Wednesday from the agency. That was a roughly 12% increase over the previous year.
The agency this year may have difficulty topping its 2025 record, in part because the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act trims by 8% its operational funding.
The funding cut will slash recovery and investigative missions planned for this year by roughly a third, according to the email.
