The four Filipino archaeologists knelt shoulder to shoulder in a trench only slightly larger than a toddler’s sandbox, shaving away paper-thin layers of earth and filling buckets with soil beneath a blazing early afternoon sun on the Philippine island of Mindanao.

A few feet away, Mike Henshaw, who spent much of his 25-year U.S. Army career recovering the remains of fallen service members, was creating a grid by stretching string between wooden stakes. He then activated a ground-penetrating radar device, hoping it would help the young scientists uncover the remains of three American soldiers executed by the Japanese 84 years ago.

Henshaw had come to the predominantly Muslim city of Marawi in June alongside archaeologist Danny Keay and forensic anthropologist Karin Dominko to begin the search. But Henshaw had another goal as well: He wanted to prove that his small American nonprofit could train Filipino archaeologists to help search for service members still missing in action from past wars.

“The question is whether the accounting mission can be done faster and for less money—with the same high standards,” Henshaw said.

That question has taken on new urgency as the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency faces intense budget pressure and dramatic reductions in missions to find Americans left behind in jungles, mountains, and former battlefields around the world.

For veterans advocates and families of the missing in action, the concern goes beyond how many recovery missions the government can afford. They see the cutbacks as a test of whether the nation can continue to make good on its longstanding promise to account for those who never came home.

“We’re not only at a crossroads. We’re also at a critical point,” said James McCormick, a highly decorated combat veteran of the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars who now serves as executive director for government affairs of Vietnam Veterans of America.

Against that backdrop, the Marawi project may offer a glimpse of how nonprofits can help the U.S. military uphold its promise to leave no service member behind. By taking a larger role in organizing recovery missions, drawing on local archaeologists for much of the painstaking fieldwork, and enlisting retired MIA specialists, Henshaw argues, they could extend the accounting mission into places where U.S. resources are limited or official teams cannot go. 

A Shrinking Field Mission

Nearly 81,000 U.S. military personnel remain unaccounted for from conflicts since World War II, according to the DPAA. More than half were lost at sea or under circumstances that make finding their remains extremely unlikely. But the agency says about 38,000 are recoverable.

The magnitude of that unfinished work is now colliding with a shrinking ability to conduct searches.

After two years of significant increases under the Biden administration, DPAA’s budget fell from $185 million in fiscal 2025 to $167 million in 2026. And Pentagon leaders want to cut it again, to $160 million next year. 

At the DPAA’s annual meeting with Vietnam-era MIA families in late June, Director Kelly McKeague pointed to a slide showing agency-led field missions worldwide falling from 105 in fiscal 2025 to a projected 48 in 2027. The situation, he said, “is ugly.”

The DPAA posted a record 231 identifications in 2025. But as The War Horse reported in May, the overwhelming majority came from previously unidentified remains exhumed from military cemeteries—not from new field recoveries. The record was set in the final year before the Pentagon’s cuts began, so unless funding for field missions is restored, the agency will likely have to rely even more on disinterments to keep its identification numbers high. 

The decline in field missions is especially painful in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, where nearly 1,600 American service members remain missing from the Vietnam War. The DPAA’s missions in the region have plunged from 42 in 2025 to only 13 planned for next year.

Many MIA families—particularly those whose relatives went missing during the war in Vietnam—see time as the greatest enemy. Landscapes change. Witnesses die. And with each passing year, families fear that clues that once might have led search teams to missing Americans can disappear forever.

On his office desk, McCormick keeps a photograph of Navy Cmdr. Edward James Jacobs Jr., whose reconnaissance aircraft disappeared with two other crewmen off the coast of North Vietnam in August 1967.

Jacobs’ daughter, Jeanie Jacobs Huffman, has long advocated for families still seeking answers about missing relatives.

“Jeanie’s father is looking down at me every day,” McCormick said. “I can’t go to sleep at night without thinking about it.”

That is one reason McCormick has little patience for Pentagon officials repeatedly invoking the sanctity of the accounting mission while sending fewer recovery teams into the field.

“We don’t want to hear any more chatter about how much you love the fallen and how much you care,” McCormick said. “The greatest form of love is in showing it, not in talking about it. Whatever the price tag is, we should pay it. We need closure. We need accountability.”

The DPAA’s budget squeeze reflects a broader Pentagon paradox. Even as overall defense spending has jumped substantially during the second Trump administration, agencies across the Defense Department have been ordered to cut costs as Pentagon leaders redirect tens of billions of dollars toward missile defense, new weapon systems, artificial intelligence, and other priorities.

“There is absolutely nobody inside of the agency that is excited about the trend line [of DPAA funding],” Chris Phelps, who oversees the agency’s operations in the Indo-Pacific region, told families at the June briefing. “It is absolutely going in the wrong way.”

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The War Horse sought comment on the DPAA’s budget from the office of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth but received no response before publication. 

Congress could still reverse some or all of the cuts. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted in early June to add $40 million to the DPAA’s budget in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a provision championed by Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Nebraska. But the House version passed in late July did not include the additional funding.

The House is back from summer recess, but the Senate will not return until Sept. 14, leaving the defense bill stalled and the DPAA’s budget outlook uncertain.

For Henshaw, the agency’s dwindling financial support strengthens the case for rethinking how recovery missions are conducted.

Henshaw, who founded the Virginia-based Asymmetric MIA Accounting Group (AMAG) in January 2025, argues that the traditional model of sending large American teams around the world has become too expensive to remain the primary approach.

He believes trained archaeologists in countries such as the Philippines could help build local recovery expertise while nonprofits and volunteers pursue more cases at lower cost.

Building a New Recovery Model

The Marawi excavation offered one possible way to extend the accounting mission as the DPAA cuts back on fieldwork. But it also showed how difficult it can be to build a local MIA recovery program from scratch.

When Henshaw arrived on Mindanao in January, he brought years of experience searching for missing Americans across Asia with predecessor agencies of the DPAA—and a list of potentially recoverable World War II cases.

For nearly a week, he drove around the Philippines’ second-largest island in a rented Toyota sedan, trying to connect with government officials and civic leaders. Scheduled meetings fell through or led nowhere. Residents warned him that he would be kidnapped or killed if he went to Marawi.

Back home in Colorado, John Bear, AMAG’s chief investigative researcher, sent email after email to potential contacts across Mindanao with little success.

Then came the reply that changed everything.

It was from Robert Alonto, a member of the Bangsamoro Commission for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage who was about to become its chairman. 

He wanted to talk.

Henshaw canceled his nonrefundable flight home and met over lunch with Alonto, his wife and son, and two Mindanao historians.

Henshaw explained how Bear had found an oral history interview with Ben Hagans, a former prisoner of war held by the Japanese who recalled watching his captors execute three Americans—Lt. Col. Robert Vesey, Capt. Albert Price, and 1st Sgt. John Chandler—at Camp Keithley, a U.S. Army post converted into a POW camp. Hagans, now 97, remembered seeing an obelisk near the execution site, offering Bear the best clue in decades to where the men might have been buried.

Hagans’ account also connected the search to Brig. Gen. Guy Fort, one of the senior U.S. Army officers who defended Mindanao. Fort had been spared during the July 1942 execution after Vesey offered to take his place. Four months later, the Japanese executed Fort after he refused to order the Moro guerrillas he had armed and trained to surrender. His remains have never been found.

Fort, the only American-born general executed by enemy forces during World War II, had spent four decades in the Philippines and knew Mindanao in a way few American officers did. Described as “a regular Daniel Boone,” he was an accomplished outdoorsman and mapmaker who learned local languages and immersed himself in Moro and other indigenous cultures. 

Fort’s deep ties to Mindanao gave local officials reason to see the search as part of their own history, not simply an American recovery mission.

“Gen. Fort is a hero to the Moro people,” Alonto told Henshaw.

By the end of the lunch, Alonto’s son, Ruh, had agreed to serve as a bridge between the Americans and the communities in which they hoped to work.

A historical researcher from one of Mindanao’s most prominent Muslim families, Ruh Alonto knew the island’s politics, history, and people. He also understood the complicated legacy of American rule in the Philippines: U.S. troops had fought bloody campaigns against the Moros in the early 20th century, but the two sides became wartime allies after Japan invaded the Philippines in December 1941.

Official U.S. recovery teams cannot work in Marawi because of State Department security restrictions stemming from threats of terrorism and civil unrest.

Alonto said President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims and the U.S. war with Iran has deepened anti-American sentiment in the region, making the Americans’ presence in Marawi especially sensitive.

The city is also still rebuilding after the five-month battle in 2017 between Philippine security forces and Islamic State-linked militants that killed more than 1,100 people, displaced hundreds of thousands, and left much of the city center in ruins.

‘The CIA Was Already Here’

Looking back, Alonto recalls thinking that Henshaw’s timetable seemed wildly unrealistic. Archaeological digs in the Philippines typically take at least a year to organize. Henshaw wanted to begin in four or five months.

“We’re all like, ‘Oh my God,’” Alonto recalled.

The team still had to recruit archaeologists, secure permits, consult local officials, obtain permission from landowners, and convince Philippine cultural authorities—accustomed to working with the DPAA—that Henshaw’s little-known nonprofit could be trusted.

A major boost came in April when Barbara Fox—whose stepfather, James Fort, was the general’s son—donated a collection of Fort’s diaries, photographs, correspondence, and artifacts to Iligan Institute of Technology, part of Mindanao State University. The collection is expected to become a permanent exhibit at the school.

Henshaw hand-delivered the materials. The donation helped build goodwill and reinforced the idea that the project was about preserving Mindanao’s history as well as recovering missing Americans.

But suspicions lingered.

The atmosphere became especially tense in April after the Philippine National Police and immigration officials arrested two young Tajik nationals for suspicious behavior in Marawi, Alonto said.

One Marawi resident lamented on Facebook that authorities were deporting Muslims while “the CIA was already here”—a reference to Henshaw and the American forensic anthropologist who had been discussing plans to return with equipment capable of detecting objects beneath the ground. 

Still, the project moved forward.

Another crucial piece fell into place after Alonto approached Leee Anthony Neri, dean of the University of the Philippines’ School of Archaeology.

Neri, who grew up in northern Mindanao, has long pushed to expand archaeological work on the island and train more archaeologists from the region. Mindanao students seeking graduate training in archaeology generally have to move to Manila, he said, forcing many to leave jobs or somehow finance years of study hundreds of miles from home.

For Neri, the AMAG project aligned closely with what he was already trying to build: a center to train local archaeologists and study the archaeology and heritage of Mindanao. So Neri assembled a team of six other archaeologists, most of whom had previously excavated with him at Kota Kalawi, a historic fort where they conducted the first archaeological excavation in Lanao del Sur province in 2024.

“It’s such an honor to be part of this team,” said Ruben Claro “Kim” Reyes IV, who grew up in Manila. “We’re only starting to write the books about these places.”

Rona Catherine Repancol, also raised in Manila, already knew Marawi from her work as a historian studying fortifications around the city. Now pursuing a doctorate in archaeology, she said the Marawi excavation deepened her appreciation for Mindanao’s Muslim culture and history.

When she’s in Marawi, Repancol always wears long sleeves and pants out of respect for local customs and often covers her hair at special events. 

Working there “connects me to the larger Philippine communities, not only the Christianized areas where I usually go,” she said. “It’s a beautiful experience.”

The Dig Begins, Then Stops

By late May, all the permits had come through. The archaeologists began arriving. The equipment was in place.

Then, as workers began clearing the site at Lanao People’s Park, a local family showed up claiming ownership of the land. The archaeological team, which had begun digging its first trench, was accused of trespassing.

Family members also suspected the Americans might be treasure hunters.

The suspicion had deep roots. The Philippines has long been gripped by stories of “Yamashita’s gold,” a vast cache supposedly hidden by retreating Japanese troops during World War II. The legend has fueled decades of often-destructive searches for buried treasure.

With the project suddenly in danger of unraveling, Ruh Alonto stepped in.

“I had to deescalate the entire situation,” he said.

Alonto explained what the team was doing and assured the family’s elders that the Americans were not searching for gold or trying to take their land.

A few days later, the elders gave the project their blessing.

Once the digging began in earnest, Henshaw said, he found himself surrounded by experienced archaeologists. What they had never done was apply those skills to the search for specific missing service members.

Henshaw and Keay showed them how to combine historical records and witness accounts with ground-penetrating radar data, map a site from a fixed survey point, and systematically search for evidence that might lead to human remains.

The knowledge flowed in both directions.

Trained to focus almost exclusively on recovering missing service members, Henshaw had long viewed anything unrelated to the case at hand as “peripheral.” Working alongside the Filipino archaeologists gave him a new appreciation for cultural archaeology, where every layer of soil, pottery fragment, and even the discoloration left by a long-decayed wooden post can help tell the story of a place.

“I learned why it’s so important for them to look at everything and not discard anything, even if it’s not related to the case we’re interested in,” he said. “It’s related to their history.”

Danny Keay understands why that history matters. He has spent decades searching for missing service members, beginning as a teenager in Germany tracking down World War II aircraft crash sites simply because he loved airplanes. 

After a 22-year U.S. Army career that included counterintelligence work, he earned a master’s degree in conflict archaeology and did postgraduate training in analyzing human skeletal remains. Over the years, he has participated in 21 recovery operations.

The volunteer work gradually shifted his focus from the aircraft and artifacts to the families still waiting for answers. He recalled one American mother whose son went missing during World War II. For five or six years, she left her front door unlocked, believing he might someday walk through it.

Stories like that changed how Keay thought about the accounting mission.

“I honestly don’t care who takes the credit,” he said. “As long as the family gets their loved one back.”

‘The Archaeology Sounds the Same’

When Owen O’Leary heard details of the Marawi excavation—the grids, the meticulous removal of soil, the buckets of dirt carried away by local laborers—the DPAA’s field sciences manager immediately recognized the process.

“The archaeology sounds the same,” O’Leary said.

The biggest difference was scale.

O’Leary, an archaeologist who spent 13 years supervising DPAA excavations and site surveys, said an archaeological survey may require eight to 10 people, while a large recovery operation can deploy 20 to 25.

Depending on the mission, those teams can include archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, military officers, medics, explosive ordnance technicians, forensic photographers, linguists, and life-support specialists.

Remote operations may require helicopters, boats, and occasionally even porters. Medical evacuation plans must be approved before recovery teams deploy. In some places, the DPAA teams sleep in tents at the site rather than lose hours each day traveling from distant hotels.

For all the sophisticated technology available to recovery teams, O’Leary said, there is still no substitute for excavations. Remote-sensing equipment can identify promising areas, but only careful excavation can establish what is actually beneath the ground.

“We do not go for easy,” O’Leary said. “We go for detailed, proper methods to ensure that we do not miss remains in the field.”

That level of staffing and logistical support is expensive. 

At the June meeting, McKeague and Phelps assured the Vietnam-era MIA families that their cases would remain a priority. According to the DPAA, those cases still account for most of the Indo-Pacific directorate’s field-operations budget—69% in the current fiscal year and a projected 65% next year.

The DPAA budgeted $16 million for 28 investigative and recovery missions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia this year—an average of $573,000 per mission. For fiscal 2027, the agency projects spending $9.1 million for 13 missions, or an average of $702,000 per mission.

Henshaw said the cost of the initial Marawi excavation was about $45,000.

Doing More With Less

The independent Marawi project reflects some of the concepts of the DPAA’s partnership program, in which the agency has leveraged the skills and resources of universities, nonprofits, foreign governments, and veterans organizations.

Rocky Gillette helped build much of that network, which he calls a “force multiplier.” As director of the agency’s Partnerships and Innovation Directorate, he works with about 130 partners worldwide, with another 40 in development.

But the Pentagon’s budget cuts are also reducing the very partnership missions the agency has relied on to expand its reach.

Gillette said his directorate had expected about $23 million for fiscal year 2027 under the Pentagon’s long-range budget plan. Instead, it’s set to receive about $12 million—a 48% reduction. His directorate had hoped to support about 55 partner-led missions next year, but now expects to support roughly 16.

“I think that the entire agency is confronted with this problem—how to do more with less,” Gillette said.

Henshaw believes his model could help. He wants qualified nonprofits to focus on specific regions, maintaining local relationships, equipment, and knowledge between DPAA deployments.

“DPAA has a global mission and necessarily rotates personnel and resources across many countries,” he said. “A regional nonprofit partner can continue investigations, follow new leads, monitor sites, build relationships, and prepare cases so that when DPAA is ready to conduct a recovery, much of the groundwork has already been completed.”

Some of the DPAA’s nonprofit partners have developed deep expertise in particular countries or regions, but usually through a succession of individual missions rather than the long-term assignments that Henshaw envisions.  

Oregon-based Project Recover, which operates in 25 countries, has returned repeatedly to Palau, an island nation just east of the Philippines, according to CEO Derek Abbey, a retired Marine officer.

Abbey said its DPAA work in Palau has been funded mission by mission through separate contracts. But multiyear agreements might be a smarter approach because they would “give us greater freedom of movement, the ability to work on multiple missions at a time, and over time will result in cost savings,” he said. 

The advantage is not only financial, Abbey said. Repeated visits help recovery teams build trust with local residents. Once they understand that the teams are searching for missing people rather than lost treasure, he said, the work takes on a different meaning for them.

“It very much becomes their mission as well,” Abbey said.

What Comes Next?

In mid-June, the Marawi excavation ended without finding the remains of the three soldiers executed at Camp Keithley.

The clue that had made the case seem so promising—Ben Hagans’ vivid memory of the execution near an obelisk—also revealed how difficult the search would be. When Ruh Alonto located the monument in late March, hidden by foliage next to a police station, he found that much of the surrounding area had been built over. He had hoped the obelisk would sit within a larger stretch of undisturbed ground. Instead, only about 20% of the area around it could be excavated.

The archaeologists discovered another complication once they began digging. Nearly two meters of fill, much of it deposited during a hydroelectric project in the 1970s, covered the wartime surface.

But the dig did uncover evidence that people had occupied the site long before World War II.

The archaeologists found earthenware shards, flakes of chert, and volcanic glass whose fracture patterns suggested some had been fashioned into stone tools. The artifacts have not yet been scientifically dated, but similar discoveries at the Kota Kalawi excavation raised the possibility that the ground being searched for Americans executed in 1942 had been occupied by people thousands of years earlier.

Before leaving Mindanao, Henshaw donated his $30,000 ground-penetrating radar system to the cultural commission and trained the Filipino archaeologists how to use it in future searches. 

The excavation also drew interest beyond the dig site. In late June, about 150 Mindanao residents attended a public exhibition at the People’s Park library about the excavation and the history of Camp Keithley.

Outside, national police officers carrying rifles stood guard. Inside, Muslim and Christian residents mingled among the displays.

The project may also have opened a path toward cooperation between Henshaw and an agency he has fiercely criticized for years.

A month after the excavation, Henshaw and Bear met virtually for more than an hour with senior DPAA officials—including Gillette, Phelps, and the agency’s chief counsel—to discuss whether AMAG and the Pentagon agency could work together.

The two sides did not reach an agreement. But in early August, AMAG submitted a proposal to conduct five MIA investigations and two archaeological excavations annually over a three-year period on Mindanao.

Henshaw estimates the program would cost $180,000 a year and rely heavily on volunteers, Filipino archaeologists, and relationships already established across the island.

The idea is to turn what happened in Marawi into a continuing presence rather than a series of stand-alone expeditions.

Keeping a qualified nonprofit in the same geographic area eliminates the repetition of assembling teams, moving equipment, and establishing local relationships, Henshaw said. 

Local archaeologists, historians, and volunteers could also develop cases between excavations by interviewing witnesses, locating forgotten cemeteries, studying wartime aerial imagery, and following new leads, he said.

The potential caseload is substantial. The DPAA says there are 180 unresolved MIA cases across Mindanao.

If American remains are found, Henshaw said, they would be handled under formal chain-of-custody procedures, transferred to the National Museum of the Philippines, and ultimately turned over to the DPAA.

Henshaw said he never intended to prove his concept through a single excavation. The real test, he said, would come from the multiyear pilot, allowing his nonprofit to maintain a continuous regional presence, pursue multiple MIA cases, and then measure the results against the cost and pace of conventional recovery missions.

He and Bear already know where they want to look next.

After studying World War II maps, eyewitness accounts, and wartime aerial imagery analyzed by AMAG volunteer Ed Bauer, Bear believes he has identified the rifle range where Japanese troops executed and buried Brig. Gen. Guy Fort.

Unlike Camp Keithley, the suspected burial site lies away from the heavily altered urban landscape that complicated the first excavation.

And when Henshaw’s team returns to Marawi, a much larger team of archaeologists and partners with the right equipment will be there, ready to start digging again.

This article from The War Horse was edited by Paul Szoldra, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.