US DPAA recovery teams arrive in China to resume search for MIA remains ahead of looming budget cuts

Recovery teams from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) traveled over the weekend to China to renew searches for the remains of missing service members, ahead of projected budget cuts that would severely curtail future missions.

The mission to China is expected to last through early September, with an investigative team working in Hunan province while field operations are conducted in Guangshi province, bordering Vietnam, according to DPAA officials.

The presence of a new recovery team in China marks another milestone in the slow evolution of China’s cooperation on the MIA issue since it agreed in 2008 to give limited access to records of the People’s Liberation Army that might aid in searches.

Since the 2008 agreement, there have been about 10 searches in China. In February 2024, China acknowledged for the first time that Chinese specialists were assisting in the site surveys.

“Over the years, committed to the humanitarian spirit, the Chinese side has provided assistance for the U.S. military to search for the remains of its missing personnel in China,” Zhang Xiaogang, a Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman, said at a regular press briefing in February 2024.

Unresolved Cases and Budget Constraints

Currently, there are believed to be about 678 unresolved cases of missing U.S. personnel in China from World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Over the years, DPAA officials have made repeated pledges to reduce the number of unresolved cases and provide answers to the families of the missing. However, those promises have now run up against the hard numbers in the defense budget.

At an annual briefing for the families last month, DPAA Director Kelly McKeague detailed the funding shortfalls in his remarks and through a series of charts:

• DPAA’s budget of $185 million for Fiscal Year 2025 was reduced to $167 million in FY26
• It is projected to come down again to $160 million in FY27

As a result, the 27 recovery and investigative teams that were in operation in Vietnam in FY2025 would be reduced to a total of seven in the projected FY2027 DPAA budget, McKeague said.

Leadership Changes

McKeague also told the families that DPAA effectively has a new boss. McKeague will remain as director but will report directly to retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Tata has called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and said he believed Obama was a Muslim.

In an interview with Military Times, McKeague pledged to work closely with Tata and said he had urged the families to press their representatives to support a bill proposed by Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., to boost the DPAA’s budget by $40 million. The bill has been attached to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act policy measure, but there is no guarantee that the money will actually be appropriated.

A Case of Limited Success

Over the years, the recovery missions in China have had limited success, but McKeague pointed to the unresolved case of Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Morton Sher, of Greenville, South Carolina.

Sher died at age 22 when his Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter was shot down on August 20, 1943, and crashed in Hengyang City, Hunan province. At the time of the crash, local villagers put up a makeshift headstone with Chinese markings at the site. Despite this, a postwar search proved unsuccessful, and Sher was officially classified as killed in action and unrecoverable.

At the time of the crash, Sher was flying for the Army Air Forces 76th Fighter Squadron, 23rd Fighter Group, 14th Air Force, where many of the Flying Tiger veterans had gone after the volunteers disbanded.

According to the Defense Department, while flying in October 1942, engine trouble forced Sher to bring his aircraft down near a Chinese village. The villagers greeted him with celebration and ordered up a feast, with Sher providing the entertainment. They later escorted him through nearby mountain villages back to his base.

Sher later recounted the experience in an Army newsletter that was picked up by the Associated Press: “I sang a few American songs for them and they were highly pleased. The banquet turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the trip.”

In a letter home the day before he was shot down, Sher told his parents that he was turning down a chance to come home and take a job as an instructor. “I let another pilot take that instructing job, for I find things too exciting here to…”