The United States government spends upward of $140 million per year to recover and identify the remains of the 81,000 unaccounted-for service members from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. … Because I have spent the last decade studying the MIA accounting effort, I'm often asked whether I think it's worth pouring all this money and effort into recovering and identifying these war dead. …  It's not a zero-sum game: these efforts make clear the steep human costs of war.