US DPAA resumes MIA searches in China as looming budget cuts threaten future missions

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 Guangxi province, which borders Vietnam, according to DPAA officials.

The deployment 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 People’s Liberation Army records that might aid in searches.

Since the 2008 agreement, there have been approximately 10 searches in China. In February 2024, China acknowledged for the first time that Chinese specialists were assisting in 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. DPAA officials have repeatedly pledged to reduce the number of unresolved cases and provide answers to families of the missing, but those promises now face hard budget realities.

At an annual briefing for 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 FY2026
• It is projected to decrease further to $160 million in FY2027

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

Leadership Changes

McKeague also informed families that DPAA effectively has a new boss. While McKeague remains as director, he now reports 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 stated he believed Obama was a Muslim.

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

A Case of Limited Success

Recovery missions in China have had limited success over the years, but McKeague pointed to the resolved 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 placed 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 Flying Tiger veterans had gone after the volunteer group 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, ordered up a feast, and Sher provided the entertainment. They later escorted him through nearby mountain villages back to his base.

Sher recounted the experience in an Army newsletter 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 he was turning down a chance to return home and take a job as an instructor. “I let another pilot take that instructing job, for I find things too exciting here to…”