Priorities

The Army released a report today on discrepancies and misplaced headstones at Arlington National Cemetery after an almost year-long study of management issues at the cemetery.  The review found that nearly one-fourth – or 64,000 - of the 260,000 grave markers at Arlington may need to be replaced or fixed.

In January, the Northern Virginia Technology Council, at Senator Warner's request, released a report detailing a roadmap to fix many of the problems with the Cemetery’s record-keeping and back-office procedures. The process used by the Army to verify grave markers in today's report from the Army followed the NVTC report's recommendations.

Senator Warner and members of NVTC discussed the report in a news conference on Capitol Hill in January.

However, the Army report does not detail the extent of the errors.

“I don’t doubt that using smartphones to catalog 260,000 headstones was a big job, but we need to know more about the extent of the discrepancies discovered by the Army. I imagine many are simple typos you would expect with a system that used paper records, but some of these may reflect broader issues,” Senator Warner said.

"It is now the responsibility of the Army to embrace the other recommendations from the NVTC report: the chain-of-custody issues with remains, the synchronization of the different digital records systems, and an overall insistence on accountability and transparency going forward.  I will continue to monitor this situation and work to ensure that our veterans are given the respect and honor that they deserve.”