Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office
agency of the United States Department of Defense
The Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO), as part of the United States Department of Defense, was an organization that reported to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy through the Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs). DPMO provided centralized management of prisoner of war/missing personnel (POW/MP) affairs within the Department of Defense.
On January 30, 2015, DPMO, along with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, were merged into the new Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. DPMO thus ceased to be as a separate entity.
During its existence, activities of the Director of the DPMO included the following:
Organize, direct, and manage the DPMO and all assigned resources.
Serve as the DoD focal point for POW/MP matters.
Provide DoD participation in the conduct of negotiations with officials of foreign governments in efforts to achieve the fullest possible accounting of Americans missing as a result of military operations.
Develop uniform DoD procedures for determination of the status of missing personnel and for the systematic, comprehensive, and timely collection, analysis, review, dissemination, and periodic update of information relating to missing personnel.
Collect and analyze information concerning U.S. military and civilian personnel that are missing, imprisoned, or unaccounted for.
Maintain case files, comprehensive records, and databases on U.S. military and civilian personnel who are or were prisoners of war, missing, or unaccounted-for as a result of hostile action in compliance with regulatory guidance mandated in the 1996 Missing Persons Act.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office” as agency of the United States Department of Defense. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as agency of the United States Department of Defense. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5251410. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 1996.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.