The Department of Defense announced on Friday the creation of a new joint interagency body, the Task Force on Task Force Identification, which will be charged with locating, cataloguing and, where feasible, contacting the other task forces stood up during the six-week war with Iran.

Officials said the new entity, designated JIATF-TFI, would operate out of a leased annex in Crystal City and report jointly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and a yet-to-be-named subcommittee of the National Security Council. Its initial mandate runs 18 months, with an option to extend pending the outcome of an internal review to be conducted by a separate task force.

“We are confident that, somewhere within the building, there exists a comprehensive list of every working group, tiger team, fusion cell and rapid-response cadre that was established between March 1 and April 15,” said Rear Admiral Donald Pace, the task force’s inaugural director, at a briefing in the Pentagon press room. “Our job is to find that list. Or, failing that, to produce one.”

Pace declined to estimate how many such bodies were created during the conflict, citing the ongoing nature of the count. A preliminary internal review, conducted earlier this month by what officials described as “an ad hoc cell,” identified 47 active task forces by name and an additional 19 referenced only by acronym. Several of the acronyms, Pace said, did not match any known unit and may have been generated in error by an unrelated procurement database.

Among the bodies the new task force will attempt to locate are the Joint Maritime Disruption Cell, the Strait Operations Coordination Group, the Persian Gulf Logistics Synchronization Team, and an entity referred to in three separate memoranda as “the Standing Group,” which officials said had not yet been linked to any standing.

The announcement comes during a period of broader institutional review across the federal government. Since the ceasefire took effect April 15, agencies have been quietly winding down or reorganizing the surge structures created at the outset of hostilities. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the volume of new entities had become difficult to track in real time.

“At one point in late March, we were standing up roughly two working groups a day,” the official said. “Some of them were chaired by deputies who had also been named to other working groups, which were in turn coordinating with cells that reported to councils. It became, in candor, a lot.”

The official said it remained unclear how many of the entities had ever held a meeting. One body, the Iran Sanctions Adjudication Steering Committee, was discovered earlier this month to have been listed on two separate org charts, neither of which matched its actual reporting line. Its chair, the official said, had been on temporary detail from the Department of Agriculture.

Congressional staff briefed on the new task force said the response on Capitol Hill had been measured. “We are supportive of any effort to reduce duplication,” said Margaret Hollings, a spokeswoman for the House Armed Services Committee. “We have asked for a briefing once the inventory is complete, and have been told that a briefing task force will be designated to coordinate that.”

The Government Accountability Office has separately opened a review of surge-period staffing decisions, including the practice — common during the conflict — of assigning the same flag officer to chair multiple coordinating bodies simultaneously. GAO investigators have not yet determined how many such concurrent assignments existed, but a preliminary tally identified at least one general officer who appeared to be the named chair of seven distinct entities, four of which had identical mission statements.

Pace, asked at the briefing whether his own task force might be subject to a future inventory, said the question had been considered. “We have built in a self-reporting protocol,” he said. “If at the conclusion of our mandate it is determined that we are ourselves a redundant body, we will be the first to flag it. Or, more precisely, a designated sub-element of our office will.”

Defense analysts said the proliferation of coordinating structures during short, intense conflicts was not new. “The Iraq surge produced something like 60 named entities by some counts, most of which were dissolved or merged within two years,” said Eleanor Briscoe, a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Management Studies. “What’s slightly unusual here is the speed. Six weeks is a brisk pace for institutional self-replication.”

Briscoe said the underlying problem was less about waste than about coherence. “When you have 50 task forces, what you effectively have is one task force with 50 chairs,” she said. “Whether that’s better or worse than no task force at all is a question I suspect a future panel will be asked to study.”

Initial funding for JIATF-TFI was drawn from unobligated balances in a supplemental appropriation passed in early March. The task force is expected to be fully staffed by mid-summer, pending the resolution of a competing personnel claim from a related entity, the Joint Personnel Allocation Working Group, which the new task force has so far been unable to locate.

A Pentagon spokesman said additional details on the task force’s structure and reporting timeline would be released in the coming weeks, once the appropriate coordinating body had been identified.