The USS Arizona burns after being struck by Japanese bombs during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. (U.S. Navy/National Archives)
The federal agency tasked with identifying unknown American service members has committed to exhuming the remains of dozens of sailors who were aboard the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The decision by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency comes as a Virginia-based advocacy group, Operation 85, closes in on the government-mandated threshold of family reference DNA collection.
“Provided everything continues as expected, we plan to start disinterment in November or December 2026,” DPAA director Kelly McKeague told Stars and Stripes on Monday.
That timing places the operation in close range of the 85th anniversary of the attack. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously called Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.”
DPAA plans to exhume the 88 unknowns associated with the Arizona from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in groups of eight, every two to three weeks, depending on the cemetery schedule, McKeague said.
After all have been exhumed and sent to the lab for potential identification, the remains of 52 of the Pearl Harbor dead without a ship affiliation will also be disinterred.
The remains will be analyzed in DPAA’s Hawaii lab as part of the Pearl Harbor Ships Project. DNA testing will be performed by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware.
Processing and analysis will begin immediately, McKeague said.
“Space and people will be committed to the project until it is completed,” he added.
Defense Department policy requires a general threshold of family reference samples from 60% of the “potentially associated service members” before the agency will disinter a group of unknown service members for identification.
In the case of the Arizona, that means DPAA needs family reference DNA from 643 distinct families. The group is now only 18 away, with enough kits mailed out to interested family members to push the effort over the line.
The journey to exhume and attempt to identify the Arizona unknowns seemed improbable until recently.
The U.S. government had DNA on file from just 25 families, according to a Navy report to Congress in March 2022. The report estimated that it would take 10 years and cost approximately $2.7 million to collect the samples needed.
Kevin Kline, a Virginia-based real estate agent whose grand-uncle, Petty Officer 2nd Class Robert Kline, was killed in the attack and remains missing, started Operation 85 in 2023 to track down other Arizona family members and get them to submit DNA to the sea services.
He said he was motivated by the anger he felt following trips to the Arizona memorial in 2022 and a subsequent DPAA family update meeting.
Kline put his career largely on hold and assembled a team that includes researchers and forensic genetic genealogists. He has said that he spent about $75,000 of his own money building websites and sending out promotional materials.
By April 2025, Operation 85 had tracked down most of the nearly 600 families that submitted DNA. Today, that number stands officially at 625.
Once the threshold is reached, DPAA plans to submit the disinterment request to the assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs for approval.
“It is significant for the USS Arizona families because up to 140 of them could receive the remains of their loved one and know definitively he is not entombed in the USS Arizona Memorial,” McKeague said.
DPAA has entered discussions with Operation 85 about partnering on future projects, though what the group’s exact role would be hasn’t yet been decided, McKeague said.
Kline hopes to use his system to help identify other unknown service members. He feels a bit of pressure to deliver for the other Arizona families, he said.
“I hope that all this work I did brings a few guys’ names back,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be awesome?”
