HONOLULU -- Each month, military scientists in Hawaii identify on average six service members who are listed as missing in action in foreign wars.

A new $62 million facility is designed to help their efforts worldwide.

As a war veteran, Sen. Dan Inouye is deeply connected to the mission of the Joint Prisoner of War-Missing in Action Accounting Command: to find all service members missing in action.

"There's a moral code, a soldiers code that if someone gets wounded out there, he's gonna be brought back. Or if he's killed, he'll be brought back," said Inouye.

More than 200 people gathered for Tuesday's groundbreaking ceremony. Currently, JPAC's laboratories dedicated to identifying these service members are split between the Air Force and Navy side of the base.

"This new facility will allow us to consolidate our resouces by having core funcitons located in one major state of the art facility," said Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom.

In 2010, 75 recovery and investigation teams deployed to 18 countries to search for the remains of unaccounted for MIA's Those remains are brought back to Hawaii for possible identification in the labs.

More than $62.6 million has been awarded for the project, which is expected to be completed by July 2013.

Last year, Inouye met a student who asked him, 'Why are we spending all this money?'

"I said, 'How would you feel out there in the front and abandoned?' In my case, if I got wounded out in the field I know someone would come by to pick me up," said Inouye.

JPAC officials said it has been tasked by Congress to double the number of MIA's identified by 2015 with the help of this new facility. JPAC's efforts to build this facility started in the mid 1990s.