“When I came in, I said that understanding the requirements as they’re being generated, and matching them to capacity, is the single most powerful capability we can have,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop in a recent interview ahead of her retirement.

On Friday, her last day leading the command, the pioneering Air Force pilot’s boss confirmed that she was leaving Transcom and the joint force with a clearer and more comprehensive grasp of America’s arsenal and options for high-stakes logistics and in-demand equipment. 

“Certainly [Van Ovost] was focused on this from the very beginning. But not just that. She’s been focused on also expanding our capability — what’s available to us. And she’s done a lot of things to increase capacity and commercial maritime assets and work on agreements between us and industry,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told DefenseScoop in a media roundtable immediately following the ceremony at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, where Van Ovost passed command of Transcom to Gen. Randall Reed. “And I think that’s given us a lot of possibilities going forward.”

As its name suggests, the command is the DOD’s primary manager for transportation. It’s responsible for integrated global mobility operations via land, air and sea — both in times of peace and war.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop, Van Ovost noted that “coming from someone who started in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, where you just opened up a container and you’re like, ‘Wow, what’s in here?'” she understood on day one at Transcom that “the more you see about where the item is, the better decisions you can make about when and how to move it the most efficiently and effectively way possible for the warfighter.”

Early on, she established four guiding priorities to pursue during her tenure. Two of those — cyber mission assurance and driving decision advantage — placed a comprehensive focus on Transcom’s technology challenges at the time.

Van Ovost directed her team to work closely with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO). Together, they facilitated many activities and projects to make sense of the heaps of military and commercial data sources the command should be applying to inform operations, and provide bird’s-eye views into DOD’s weapons and personnel placements all over the world via custom analytics dashboards and other tools.

“Anytime we have a crisis, we stand up an operational planning team and then our people that work on data are in the team right away — and they’re saying, ‘Okay, well, how do I help? What kind of data do you need to see to make decisions?’” she told DefenseScoop.

Among a wide range of missions under Van Ovost’s leadership, Transcom delivered more than $21 billion in weapons and ammunition to Ukraine for defense against Russia, and helped surge assets to U.S. Central Command as conflicts emerged and unfolded in the Middle East.

With each new mission, she noted, logistics experts and others involved are making decisions faster and with more precision. 

“But when I think about the journey we have been on, I do think that decision advantage and cyber mission assurance have been some of the most consequential work that I was involved in. Certainly all of the great heroes around Transportation Command and our components that were involved from, from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Niger — all heroes and all good work. But it’s about the future, right? And so have I set Transcom up for that future?” she said.

Military operational environments are becoming increasingly contested in all domains, and the pace and complexities of mobility missions have only intensified for Transcom over the last three years. 

“And should we go into conflict, we have to expand multiple times,” Van Ovost noted. “That’s why we need the data together, and that’s why we need to start with bots, with generative AI … and then move to predictive AI so that I can understand how to best lay in demand and capacity. But it’s a must. It is a must that we have this augmentation.”

When asked about Van Ovost’s legacy, Austin told DefenseScoop: “She’s a forward-thinking officer. And the impact that she’s had on the organization, and therefore all of DOD, I think will be remembered for a long time.”

At the Transcom change-of-command ceremony shortly before that press roundtable, Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown spotlighted her perseverance and influence as a “trailblazer” in the U.S. defense apparatus.

Among a variety of personal stories and anecdotes, the secretary mentioned how the Air Force Academy didn’t originally admit her the first time she applied.

“You wanted to fly Mach 2. But back then, women weren’t allowed to fly fighters. So once again, you made the path wider. And you became a test pilot — and you flew more than 30 aircraft, including F-15s and F-16s,” Austin said.

“You’ve often said that it’s hard to be what you cannot see. Well, America looks at Gen. Jackie Van Ovost and sees a leader,” he told her.

As for her next steps, the retired commander is now looking to divert that same passion and energy to empowering minority students all around the country, with aims to ultimately help expand and empower the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) talent pipeline.

“I think we’ve made some real inroads, and I just wish the best for everyone,” Van Ovost said.

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And according to Transcom Commander Air Force Gen. Jackie Van Ovost, that digital hub continues to improve and steadily inform mission-based learnings with each new deployment and application.  

“It may not be right when a crisis hits, but soon, we know we’ve got to get the data under control,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop in a recent interview.

As its name suggests, Transcom is ultimately responsible for providing all of the Defense Department’s transportation and mobility operations across air, land, and sea. By nature, it is a significant owner and operator of military logistics data.

Since 2021 when Van Ovost took leadership as Transcom’s first-ever female commander, the command has been increasingly assigned global operations in and around highly contested locations — like in the Middle East and Ukraine, where contemporary warfare and conflicts continue to emerge and unfold.

That same year, the DOD also started heavily investing in its nascent enterprise Advana technology platform. 

Broadly, Advana hosts government-owned data from sources that span the world in a one-stop flexible architecture that enables analytics, data management and data science tools, as well as associated decision-making support services for department and military components. DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office currently oversees and facilitates Advana’s use. 

In a recent, separate interview, Garrett Berntsen, the CDAO’s new deputy for mission analytics, told DefenseScoop that with Van Ovost at the helm, Transcom has been a “key partner” that’s “fundamentally leading the way” on Advana’s use among the commands.

Notably, the CDAO recently revealed that it is conducting a massive re-competition of its Advana contract. When asked about the recently reported brief pause in the platform’s use, a Transcom spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the hold “had no effect” on the command’s user experience so far.

“We’ve continued to have full Pegasus capabilities, to include bringing in additional data sources, building additional dashboards and applications, and experimenting with AI capabilities,” the official said.

Van Ovost is set to retire from that role this month. But early on as commander, she called on Transcom’s first-ever Chief Data Officer Markus Rogers to prioritize data management and analytics resources within Advana.

“It was really nascent. But frankly, the Afghanistan [non-combatant evacuation operations, or NEO], which was a crisis — that spiked us out as far as, ‘OK, how do we organize? How do we get the data on what passengers are moving, what’s their affiliation, what’s the ground truth?’ And eventually, we were able to get that into Advana, so everybody could see it. What we learned with that, now we’ll apply for any kind of NEOs,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop. 

Despite devastation from a suicide bomb detonated by the Taliban during that operation in the fall of 2021, Transcom helped lead the evacuation of more than 124,000 people — marking​​ the largest NEO in U.S. military history.

Subsequently, Van Ovost and her team started to puzzle out how they could tap into the State Department’s NEO-tracking systems and “get that truth data” on individuals, whether it be for missions “stopping at a location for an overnight” that involve light processing of information on people, or “taking them all the way to final destination.” 

“Now this seems very simple and something the airlines do every day. When you get on an Italian airplane, you show your passport and go on up. But obviously, in a NEO situation, you may not even have an identification on somebody. So how do we do that? And [Advana] helped us with that,” Van Ovost explained.

Transcom’s data-focused officials started collaborating with their counterparts at other combatant commands, and in particular U.S. European and Africa commands. For her part, Van Ovost was serious about motivating other leaders to get their Advana-feeding data sources in order for appropriate use. 

Once people knew four-star generals were interested in conveniently applying that vast data and operational information, they became more invested in cleaning it all up and making it more widely available. 

“So the more discipline we have from the top-down to demand it, the more you’re going to see it in the populace, and then the more people get confident in using that data — and with briefing live from the data — like you see at [U.S. Northern Command] and at [U.S. Central Command],” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop.

The U.S. government has provided more than $61.3 billion in weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine since Russia launched its latest full-scale invasion of the neighboring nation in February 2022. 

To date, Transcom has played a central role in the provision of that materiel to Ukraine.

“We have done so much with respect to the movement of stuff for Ukraine, which is also a data-heavy endeavor from end-to-end that we’re placing into Advana. We’re working with the Army on, ‘Where’s the ammunition coming from, and whatnot?’ And that’s been helpful,” Van Ovost said. 

As the services are getting more quality data that they can rely upon “under control” and accessible, she explained, everyone involved can orient and coordinate around the challenge at hand in one place — and each write their own apps on top of that data.

“We moved about 100 data sources in there, and now we have access to hundreds more through Advana. And we wrote 35 apps — so everybody got to see it in a different way. It didn’t really matter, whether you were in the budgeting directorate, in the planning directorate, in the operations directorate, you all had different apps and you could see different things out of that very same data. And that’s the magic — getting people excited about, ‘What does the data do for you?’ But you don’t get there unless you have the data,” Van Ovost said.

Over the course of her leadership at Transcom, the commander added, “the pace has not stopped.”

“The environment is becoming more clearly contested in all domains, and so you have to take that into account in everything. You cannot continue to do things the same way,” she said.

Most recently, Transcom was a major mobility player in the U.S. military’s retrograde of its forces, drones and other assets at two locations out of Niger last month.

“What we were able to do through Advana was place all of the data for the movement requirements being populated by the people at those airfields into a system so that we could see it. Africom could see it, the Joint Staff could see it, and we essentially can self-synchronize what actually needs to flow at what timelines, and submit for things like diplomatic clearances and hazardous clearances, which can be a hang-up that can slow things down if you do not prepare for that,” Van Ovost said. 

“So the fact that we were able to all see the same thing and synchronize, we were able to have zero delays with respect to the movement of that stuff to the final destination. And [as we move forward] I’ll be able to characterize exactly how much it costs and the timeframes, and then how would you maneuver that if we had to do it in another location? So, we’re learning a lot in that way,” she told DefenseScoop.

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During AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference last week, Air Force leadership doubled-down on its intent to field next-gen capabilities, including a sixth-generation fighter jet and bomber, accompanying loyal wingman drones and a modern tanker. After months of uncertainty and conflicting public statements, the service acknowledged that it’s taking a number of external factors into consideration as it reevaluates its plans.

But while nothing is currently set in stone, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall emphasized during his keynote speech at the conference that the service will have “simultaneous and well-supported answers” about its future aircraft programs in the coming months.

“We are looking at what we need in order to achieve air superiority in a manner consistent with the increased threat, the changing character of war in the most cost- and combat-effective way,” Kendall said.

NGAD paused

Earlier this year, Air Force leadership began suggesting it was having second thoughts on its plans to acquire a a new stealth fighter jet — known as the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform. 

Kendall confirmed to reporters at the AFA conference that the service has halted the selection process for NGAD in order to reexamine the Air Force’s current design concept and ensure the platform is right for future threat, budget and technology environments.

The aircraft was initially designed to replace the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, and is envisioned as a long-range crewed platform equipped with advanced capabilities that can operate in highly contested environments. Kendall said NGAD’s current design as an F-22 replacement is several years old, and a number of new factors have come into play since it was first developed.

The pause isn’t expected to last more than a few months, he added.

Kendall has tapped a team of advisors led by his special assistant, Tim Grayson, to oversee the NGAD platform’s reevaluation in a context that considers emerging technologies and the service’s other future aircraft.

One point of consideration is the Air Force’s plans to conduct more disaggregated forms of air superiority, which is both the main mission for the F-22 and the intended one for the NGAD system.

During a panel at the conference, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jim Slife noted that in the past, the service would design a single platform with specific requirements and capabilities — such as size, range and thrust — so that it could execute a specific mission set, such as air superiority.

“We’ve gotten to a point now where our systems-level integration, we have the ability to disaggregate these capabilities and look at air superiority more broadly than just, ‘Hey, we have to build a platform to do a thing,’” Slife said.

The Air Force is already moving down a path of proliferating its capabilities more broadly on the battlefield, especially with its in-the-works drones known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). However, the concept “puts into question the design concept that we’ve been working on” for the NGAD platform, Kendall said. 

“It’s a fairly mature design concept, and … it’s an F-22 replacement. You can make some inferences from that,” he added. “The CCAs are about air superiority first and foremost. As we go forward, I expect there’ll be a strike aspect of CCAs as well, but initially we’re focused on air superiority and how to use the CCAs in conjunction with a crewed aircraft to achieve air superiority.”

Both the NGAD platform and CCAs are considered part of the next-generation air dominance family of systems, and thus closely connected during their respective development processes. The Air Force planned to have the NGAD aircraft and its fifth-generation fighters available to fly alongside the loyal wingman drones as a way to augment and extend capabilities of manned platforms.

According to Kendall, how much the Air Force can harness autonomy for both its fighter jet and CCA drones is part of the larger NGAD evaluation.

“We’re looking at a range of alternatives, and crewed versus uncrewed is one of the things we’re thinking about. … I believe that we’re probably going to do one more version of a crewed, more traditional aircraft. I don’t know exactly what that aircraft will look like yet,” Kendall said. “It’s design to make it able to control CCAs effectively and fight with CCAs — I think is a question mark. Whether there’ll be variants that might be crewed or uncrewed is another question mark.”

Kendall also emphasized that once fielded by the 2030s, armed CCAs will have to be under strict oversight by the manned fighters operating them — meaning they will require line-of-sight communications.

“We’re not going to have aircraft going out and doing engagements uncontrolled. So the default, if they lose communications, would be for them to return to base, which takes them out of the fight,” he continued. “So we don’t want that to happen. And when they do engagements, we want them under tight control.”

At the same time, the Air Force is trying to wrangle in the unit cost of the NGAD platform so that the service can field the aircraft in high-enough numbers to deter adversaries. For Kendall, an ideal price point for NGAD would be around that for the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet.

“I’d like to go lower, though,” he said. “Once you start integrating CCAs and transferring some mission equipment and capabilities functions to the CCAs, then you can talk about a different concept, potentially, for the crewed fighter that’s controlling them. So there’s a real range in there.”

Original estimates for the sixth-gen aircraft were around $300 million per plane, about three-times as much as what an F-35 costs today. Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter later told reporters during a roundtable at the conference the service is looking to create a more affordable NGAD design concept, noting it may not come at the cost of an F-35 in the end.

As for what the intended output of the NGAD pause will be, such as a new request for information (RFI) or request for proposals (RFP), Hunter said that depends on what answers the Air Force finds in its analysis.

“There’s different possible points of optimization. If those points are very close to where we already are, there may not need to be a huge change in our approach. If they are not close, there will have to be a significant change to our approach,” he said.

Next-gen tanker and acquisition

As the Air Force mulls over NGAD, it’s also moving forward on another future aircraft program known as the Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS), while also testing out a new acquisition model that focuses on mission systems separately from the platforms themselves.

NGAS is a tanker that’s supposed to be designed to refuel other aircraft in more contested environments than today’s systems can. The service recently released an RFI for the platform’s mission systems as a way to establish a vendor pool for the program early, while also giving industry an early opportunity to help inform the Air Force’s requirements formation process, Hunter said.

“It’s not, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick one of you to be in charge of something for the next several decades.’ It’s about creating a pool of talent, if you will, a pool of industry capability that we will continuously access and continuously work with over time to achieve the objectives of delivering a capability, delivering a system,” Hunter said during a panel discussion at the AFA conference.

Focusing on mission systems first rather than the NGAS airframe was another intentional move by the Air Force, he later told reporters. The service is trying to pivot away from decades-old acquisition strategies where a single prime contractor is responsible for nearly every part of an aircraft program.

Instead, the department wants to buy aircraft mission systems separately moving forward as part of what Hunter referred to as the “next-generation acquisition model.”

One element of the new strategy includes engaging with industry early on in the process, while another “is having direct relationships, where it makes sense and where we can, with our mission system providers,” Hunter said. “The reason why is, your mission systems have to integrate across a broad swath of our force in order to accomplish the missions that we have to do, the complex mission threads that go into high-intensity conflict with a peer competitor.”

Another RFI for the NGAS airframe will come after the Air Force finishes conducting an analysis of alternatives (AOA) for the platform by the end of 2024, which will give insights into what its future aerial refueling needs will be and how quickly the new system can be developed.

The analysis will also inform the Air Force’s plans to purchase an interim tanker that will help bridge the gap between the service’s current fleet of air refueling platforms and the future NGAS, which is expected to be fielded in the mid-2030s, Hunter said.

Speaking to reporters during a roundtable at the AFA conference, head of U.S. Transportation Command Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost emphasized the importance of fielding NGAS as quickly as possible to prepare for future conflicts.

She noted that initial insights into the AOA are not surprising, and cover how the tanker will fly in contested environments, the need for low visibility, and concepts of operations for refueling both manned and unmanned platforms.

“I’m hoping that as NGAS AOA comes out and we are able to expose all those technologies, that no matter the platform, I can start getting those technologies as soon as possible,” Van Ovost said.

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“I’ll do community work, and likely, some sort of national component,” Van Ovost, the first female officer to ever lead Transcom, told DefenseScoop on Tuesday.

During an exclusive interview on the sidelines of AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference, the head of the combatant command shared new details about both her and Transcom’s plans for what’s to come.

The discussion happened on the same day that Congress hosted a confirmation hearing for the official nominated to be her successor, Air Force Gen. Randall Reed. 

“There’s a process for the committee to vote out and then the full Senate to vote out. So, the earliest they could do that is next week, and then they go off on recess. If they do it next week, we’ll have a change of command the following week on Oct. 4. If they don’t do it, then they’ll do it after the first voting session, which is probably the third week of November, because they’re out in October. So, it’ll be about 45 or 50 days later,” Van Ovost explained.

In her view, Reed is a “mobility giant” with the right international and industry experience — and temperament — for Transcom’s high-stakes missions.

“He’s going to be fantastic for the U.S. Transportation Command. And I know he’s just as passionate as I am about the contested environment and how we’re going to have to operate. So I’m looking forward to cheering him on in the stands,” Van Ovost said.

As for her own immediate plans after she leaves Transcom and retires from the military, the Air Force command pilot hopes to take a little time to rest, recharge and connect with her family.

“As I think about the next portions of my life, I could tell you something that has been a passion of mine for 40 years — [encompasses] STEM and minorities,” she said.

“Our nation needs more STEM graduates. It is how we advance, and it’s how we will win. This is a whole-of-nation fight, and China’s already in that whole-nation fight. They already produce more STEM graduates than we produce high school graduates. How are we going to win? And so in particular, I’m focused on minorities, because I really do think that that’s the diversity of America and I think they’re underrepresented in and a very capable population that we can actually mobilize against the problem,” the commander told DefenseScoop.

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Transcom chief Gen. Jackie Van Ovost shed light on how her team is prioritizing information-sharing with international partners and turning to open-source capabilities — with caution — to help hold U.S. rivals like China and Russia accountable and ultimately deter aggression.

“You see that the information is key, and how we scrape and get that information all together —  for us, bringing it up and combining it with information from other security levels is critical,” she told DefenseScoop on Monday during a media roundtable at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference.

Broadly, Transcom is a functional combatant command that’s charged with leading the Defense Department’s integrated global mobility operations via land, air and sea in times of peace and war. 

“One reality we’re certain of is that contested logistics will be the norm in any future fight,” Van Ovost explained. 

“China has invested heavily in securing their own logistics. From the largest maritime container fleet in the world to software and infrastructure — they are working hard to reshape the world and they understand that logistics is the soft power with hard consequences across the [diplomatic, information, military and economic spheres],” she also noted.

Van Ovost spotlighted some of the recent military and economic pressure China has been putting on its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific region — while also “clearly threatening Taiwan” — which, in her view, already demonstrates certain complex and emerging challenges associated with military logistics and associated operations of the present and future.

For instance, she noted a new national map that the Chinese government rolled out last month, claiming certain disputed territories and waters as its own. 

“I don’t think that expansion is going to stop and, frankly, our allies and partners in the Pacific are really very aware of this now, and the number one thing we can do is to build them together to try to have a common understanding of what is happening — and to name and shame when things occur,” she said.  

That “naming and shaming” has been a necessary tactic particularly lately, she suggested, as China’s Coast Guard and maritime militia have attempted to harass members of the Philippines military conducting resupply missions to their outpost at Second Thomas Shoal.

“They were shouldered by the China Coast Guard and they were water-cannoned by the China Coast Guard — which can hurt the boat and people onboard, right? And now there’s overhead imagery that shows the aggressive maneuvers by China, which became unclassified and sent out for people to see. So, name and shame — just like we did with Russia as they started building up on the border with Ukraine prior to their full scale invasion,” Van Ovost said.

But as her command increasingly leans on information-sharing and open-source capabilities to keep their own personnel and international partners informed, they’re also being deliberate about ensuring that data and insights are not tampered with or influenced by adversaries. 

“We do see how Russia is trying to take it and make it misinformation, and they take a piece of it that’s factual and they build a whole story around it. That is happening in other areas — we fully expect to be attacked in that way,” she said.

“So, our discernment is key,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop.

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“Last month, we completed our implementation of our core zero-trust capabilities on our classified network, reaching the baseline maturity level,” Van Ovost said at the National Defense Transportation Association’s Fall meeting. “Our work is never done on this front and we will continue to advance this initiative, especially in the unclassified environment.”

Zero trust is a buzzy security framework at the heart of the Pentagon’s broader cybersecurity strategy that essentially moves responsibility for digital defenses from static, system-based perimeters to the constant evaluation of users and platforms on networks. Recognizing that resilience in the cyber domain directly translates to agility in all the others — now, and moving forward — the command is working deliberately to ensure that its technological enterprise is backstopped by a secure and resilient cyber ecosystem.

Van Ovost thanked the association’s cybersecurity committee and industry members for collaborating with Transcom’s cyber mission assurance team to inform its zero-trust work.  

“Our strength is derived from the interconnection of our capabilities, the resilience of our global network and the dedication of our people. This is a strategic advantage. We must evolve — and we need you with us all the way,” she said.

The command has been instrumental in the U.S. government’s delivery of weapons and equipment to Ukraine, particularly since Russia’s unprovoked invasion in February — but also before it. 

These “current events driven primarily by the acute threat posed by Russia” are demonstrating for military leadership that logistics remains a key and critical warfighting function, according to Van Ovost. At the same time, the President’s recently unveiled National Security Strategy also “makes it clear that China and Russia are working overtime to undermine democracy,” she noted. Each in their own ways, she said, both nations aim to erode the legitimacy of established international norms and laws that have persisted for nearly a century. 

“Geopolitically, China remains our most consequential strategic competitor,” Van Ovost said Monday. “Daily, in the cyber domain, they target our networks, probe our critical infrastructure servers and seek to benefit from the intellectual properties of our civilian companies and military organizations.”

And “militarily,” the Chinese have studied America’s logistics capabilities and “have custom-designed their kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities to target our lines of communication,” she added. Further, the underlying physics of the problem set across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the capacity to generate and sustain operational momentum in compressed timelines to more destinations with limited capacity would likely present new challenges in future warfare for the command.

“With this in mind, and to ensure Transcom remains ready now and in the future, earlier today we released our command strategy that is focused on evolving our strategic advantage,” Van Ovost noted at the event. That 16-page document presents the unit’s priorities as it works to ultimately “meet the realities of the contested environment that we operate in,” she added, as well as future hurdles that will likely need to be confronted.

Transcom’s operations rely on the connectivity of the Defense Department’s networks, and cybersecurity is one of the main elements prioritized in this new strategy. 

The document directs “everyone” within the command to “drive mission assurance” to support this capacity by “embracing the individual responsibility to be a cyber defender” and maintaining vigilance every day. 

“Future operations will not resemble recent successes,” Van Ovost said Monday. Still, these ongoing pursuits are demonstrating the importance of unified strategies and integrated deterrence-based approaches for military leadership. In her view, only through secure and reliable command and control capabilities will the joint force be able to effectively apply its finite resources against potential future requirements to maneuver at a pace and scale that’s never been done before.

“There’s a lot at stake in this decisive decade,” Van Ovost noted frequently during her talk.

Emphasizing that focus on mission assurance, she also requested that Transcom’s commercial partners more openly share the cybersecurity threats they are facing with one another — and, particularly, the government — going forward.

“I know that’s maybe a concerning topic, especially when you’re competitors in the commercial marketplace. But in the end, our adversaries are really not interested in our competition. They’re just interested in ensuring that you cannot mobilize the force and we cannot deploy the force,” Van Ovost said. “So I think you’ll see on the intelligence side that we’ll share more and more, and I think that’s where we need to go. But that requires trust.”

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Transcom is a functional combatant command that steers the Defense Department’s integrated global mobility operations via land, air and sea in peacetime and conflicts. It produces and collects massive volumes of data from many complex sources to perform those functions — and recently began developing and applying a new dashboard to drive more data-informed decision-making.

During a media roundtable at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space and Cyber conference, Transcom Commander Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost shed light on some of the ways the command is deploying and experimenting with nascent technologies to strengthen how it operates.

“The complexity of future operations requires us to treat data as a strategic asset,” Van Ovost told reporters.

Through performing missions over the last few years, members of Transcom learned valuable lessons about using data to their advantage.

During the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Van Ovost noted, Transcom officials quickly recognized the need to rapidly identify what assets and people needed to be removed, when, on what timeline and to where.

“The first thing we’ve had to do is to go find that data,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop during the roundtable. “And so, as I apply it to what’s going on in Ukraine, we’ve worked very hard from end-to-end to understand the data flows.”

For example, for the lethal weapons the command is bringing to support Ukraine, data must be captured on where the assets are made and stored, and the best method for delivery. A lot can be done in very short periods, but “you only go as fast as your slowest piece — so, we have to understand ourselves end-to-end,” she added.

Transcom is developing and refining analytical models to better grasp a lot of its crucial logistics characteristics and pulling in data to better simulate the functions it needs to do.

“So, let’s take that to the Pacific,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop, providing an example of the command’s approach, where the Air Force is doing agile combat deployment, the Marine Corps has expeditionary air base operations, the Navy has “their own advanced maneuvering from the sea” and the Army has its own specific maneuver concepts.

“What I need to do is take those concepts” and merge them together into one, Van Ovost explained, adding that “that’s what we’re doing in our future deployment and distribution analysis” initiative.

Transcom cannot use the same airlift deficits to do all that it does, so officials are looking at joint solutions that can meet all the service’s requirements.

“We’re developing these analytical capabilities — and frankly, it looks a lot like understanding that data and structuring it, pulling it in and then modeling it. And if the model doesn’t work, go back and change the model. So, it’s not… perfect. That’s why it’s iterative,” the four-star general said.

Military and Pentagon leaders are learning a lot from tech-savvy Ukrainians in this modern conflict who are deploying drones to their advantage in new and unexpected ways.

Drones, Von Ovost noted, bring back data on critical aspects like terrain, movements, ports, where missiles are being fired and enemy movements. Beyond enabling battlespace awareness, she said Air Force and Navy components of Transcom are also exploring vertical takeoff and landing technologies to enable last-mile deliveries.

“You’d be surprised that when a ship has a casualty — which is a problem — a huge proportion of the time, the problem has to do with getting a part that’s less than 400 pounds. It could be just a couple of circuit cards, and for that they have to pull into port,” the commander noted.

Transcom elements are working on developing a vertical takeoff and landing capability that can move over water — “which is a little different problem than land, frankly, for the drones,” she noted — holding assets that are less than 400 pounds, “so they can support ships at sea that have casualties, that need parts.”

In support of unfolding data- and artificial intelligence-driven projects, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks recently deployed a few experts from her newly formed Chief Digital and AI Office to Transcom headquarters.

“We’re excited about it,” Van Ovost said.

Still, while the command’s “liquidity is increasing,” the commander said her overarching aim is to get relevant data and associated capabilities down to the tactical level — like to aircraft commanders and ship drivers — to inform their operations and how their strategic environment is evolving.

“So, it’s really important — as you say, it’s very sensitive to me,” Van Ovost told DefenseScoop in the roundtable. “We’re experimenting as much as possible and learning from what other people are doing in AI and advanced analytics.”

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Transcom is a functional combatant command responsible for the Defense Department’s integrated global mobility operations via land, air and sea in times of peace and conflict. The CDAO, established in December by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, was created to enable a stronger foundation for data analytics and AI-enabled capabilities to be developed and deployed at scale across the department.

During a visit to Transcom on Thursday, Hicks heard firsthand how information gleaned from the CDAO is enabling members of the command to better apply data and predictive analytics when carrying out its missions.

“This is about an end-to-end movement from a depot on a train or a truck to an airport or seaport to an airport or seaport — linking up with a theater sustainment command,” Transcom Commander Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost said in a briefing with Hicks.

Hicks said: “This is where the data fusion has a significant amount of promise to give everybody a common picture book to be able to see ourselves and sort of plan ahead with what we see.”

Officials at Transcom are now developing a new tool called the Global Mobility Nodal Posture Dashboard to provide a quick, real-time view of the organization’s workloads worldwide.

“This is an upgrade from our current [assessment tool], which is only able to be updated weekly,” Brig. Gen. Charles Bolton, chief of the command’s global operations center, said during a briefing. “And the new dashboard will provide details and enable additional analysis compared to the current system.”

Additionally, the dashboard will have the ability to drill down into targeted combatant commands to also focus on what Transcom is providing to them.

“You could drill down to a specific airport or seaport to see what’s going on there and display the accusative efforts of individual force movements,” Bolton said.  

He and his team are working with CDAO components to gain access to datasets necessary to build their envisioned solution. Next steps will involve curating and fully making sense of all that data to provide the best, overarching views via the dashboard.

At Transcom’s global operations center, officials highlighted one of the key transportation hubs being used to send weapons from the United States to Europe for Ukrainian forces — and they displayed the posture, capacity and throughput at that individual node. New data analytics capabilities are expected to provide additional tools to support planning efforts for mobility operations.

“This rapid notification and nodal flexibility will be critical during contested logistics environments. While these functions and datasets are still in the works, due to the iterative development of the dashboard, we believe it will be extremely beneficial to Transcom and … our decision-makers in the future,” Bolton said.

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