It Starts With a Name

How Project Recover Plans a Mission
By Adrian De La Rosa

Most people see the end of what we do. A family receives a flag. A name gets a bronze rosette. A service member finally comes home.

What they don’t see is the year, sometimes years, that came before that moment.

I’m Adrian De La Rosa, chief operating officer of Project Recover. My job is to make sure that when our team deploys to the Pacific Ocean, an olive field in Italy, a tropical rainforest, or a mountain range in the Pacific Northwest, everything that needs to be in place actually is. Here’s an honest look at how that happens.

Every mission starts with a person. Our lead historian, Colin Colbourn, digs through military records, casualty reports, witness accounts, and decades-old documents to build a picture of what happened and, more importantly, where. Research analyst James Witkoski is often deep in that work, tracking down the detail that turns a general area into a specific set of coordinates.

This phase can take many months. We’re working with records that are often more than 80 years old. A flight log here, a survivor’s statement there. In many cases, those accounts were written by people who were under fire when they wrote them.

When the research points us to a specific location with enough confidence, the case moves forward. When it doesn’t, we keep digging.

Is It Even Reachable?

Once we have a location, the real planning begins. That’s where my work kicks into high gear.

Project Recover is the only non-governmental organization in this field that is fully vertical. That means we can handle every part of a missing-in-action repatriation: historical research, site documentation, reconnaissance, search operations, and recoveries both underwater and on land. We’ve worked in cold open water and tropical rainforests, on remote Pacific islands and in mountain terrain in the Pacific Northwest. If a U.S. service member went missing there, we can operate there.

That range is what makes planning so important: What kind of mission does this case actually require?

Some sites call for a dive team and underwater search tools like side-scan sonar. Others need investigators conducting interviews with local witnesses. Some cases aren’t ready for a field team at all. They need another round of archival research first. Before we commit people and resources, we have to match the mission type to what the evidence actually supports.

We also have to answer the access question. Whether we’re heading to a remote Pacific island or a domestic shoreline, getting a qualified team on site is never simple. That means looking at permits, environmental conditions, relationships with host nations, and whether the infrastructure exists to support our work once we arrive.

We don’t go anywhere we haven’t been approved to work. Building those relationships takes time and trust.

Building the Team

Project Recover’s team isn’t just one type of person. Depending on what the mission requires, a deployment might include historians, marine archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, terrestrial search specialists, underwater recovery divers or drone operators, sometimes several of those on the same expedition.

Figuring out who needs to be there, and making sure they’re available, credentialed and properly equipped, is its own puzzle. We work with university partners and specialized contractors alongside our core staff. Every person on a mission is there for a specific reason.

The Logistics Nobody Thinks About

Here’s the unglamorous truth: Getting the right people, equipment and supplies to the right place is enormously complex, and it looks different every single time.

We’re talking about shipping specialized scientific equipment through multiple countries. Coordinating arrival schedules so a research team, a field crew and a logistics team all land within the same narrow window. Managing food, housing and communications in places that don’t have the infrastructure we’re used to back home.

This is where donor support becomes real. Every dollar we raise has to stretch beyond just the science. It covers equipment cases, charter fees and flights into places most people have never heard of.

Then We Go

When everything lines up, the research, the permits, the team, the funding, the logistics, we go.

And when it works, a family gets a phone call they’ve waited decades for.