DoD Doctrine on Recovering Captured Military Personnel
The recovery of American personnel who are lost or captured in the course of military operations abroad is the subject of a new Department of Defense doctrinal publication (pdf).
“The President of the United States can choose to exercise military, diplomatic, or civil options, or a combination thereof, to recover isolated personnel” and each of these options has been utilized over the past two decades, the report notes.
The practices and procedures for locating missing personnel and for planning and executing their recovery are discussed. See “Personnel Recovery,” Joint Publication 3-50, January 5, 2007 (283 pages, 2.5 MB PDF).
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has been laying the foundation to expand the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) for energy infrastructure and supply chains.
Get it right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.
As of March 2026, there were at least nine documented U.S. wrongful arrests tied to face recognition misidentification. Errors like these are as much human as machine.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?