MIA

ProPublica has another fascinating study, the military's attempt to find those who have been missing in action. The Pentagon spends about $100 million a year to find these men, but has been surprisingly ineffective. Last year, the military identified just 60 service members out of the about 83,000 Americans missing from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, around 45,000 of whom are considered recoverable.

The problem is the agency with primary responsibility for these efforts: the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, or J-PAC. J-PAC has had the same director, Tom Holland, for 19 years but he has failed to acknowledge that the world has changed in those years and now DNA has become the primary tool to identify people, whether living or dead. Further, his interpretation of the rules for disinternment is quite strict. More than 9,400 service members are buried as “unknowns” in American cemeteries around the world. Holland's lab has rejected roughly nine out of every 10 requests to exhume such graves.