{"id":60746,"date":"2015-07-06T10:46:53","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T14:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60746"},"modified":"2015-07-06T10:46:53","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T14:46:53","slug":"michael-linnington-dpaa-chief-wants-closer-ties-to-private-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=60746","title":{"rendered":"Michael Linnington; DPAA chief wants closer ties to private groups"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Military Times reports that Michael Linnington, a recently retired Army Lieutenant General who took over the new Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency DPAA<\/a> sees value in his agency partnering with non-government agencies and private groups who are searching for missing military personnel like his agency is supposed to find. That makes sense, since they’ve been at least as successful as the Defense Department’s folks. He claims that merging two agencies into one will be accomplished by the end of this year;<\/p>\n

He has little experience in the MIA mission, but told The Associated Press last week that he knows its history is riddled with controversy as well as criticism from Congress and groups that advocate for families of the missing.<\/p>\n

“I am aware of some of the reports on the dysfunction,” he said, referring to 2013 reports of deep conflict among multiple agencies previously assigned to the accounting mission.<\/p>\n

“Whenever you have disparate organizations all focused in the same area, there’s going to be a natural tendency to step on each other,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m glad that he’s taking on this job, but my problem is that they’ve completely undone everything that was in place before and started from the beginning. Hondo can tell you that they’ve changed their website, so that it’s has been more difficult to find information on actual POWs, and it’s a more complicated process now just verifying a POW’s claims – but it’s been getting better since the changes began. However it’s easier finding news about recently identified remains<\/a> than it used to be, so there’s that.<\/p>\n

Having a combat veteran in the catbird seat who understands the importance of reclaiming our missing can only improve the agency, I suppose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Military Times reports that Michael Linnington, a recently retired Army Lieutenant General who took over … Michael Linnington; DPAA chief wants closer ties to private groups<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-veterans-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}