“Right now, [the lab is] working with Transcom’s Surgeon General on how to build analytic tools with patient data to handle a mass casualty event,” John DeLapp, the futures division chief at the command’s analytics center, or TCAC, told DefenseScoop.

Other projects include but are not limited to advanced AI for large-scale in-flight messaging analyses, and algorithms to inform global air refueling missions. They’re all unfolding via a well-established partnership that the command has dubbed the MIT Lincoln Lab Living Plan. 

Officials briefed DefenseScoop on this collaborative initiative during an exclusive tour of the command’s headquarters at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, this week. They also shared new details about an upcoming exercise that aims to optimize data transmission across a broad spectrum of operations.

MASCOT

Launched by the command in 2011, the lab’s “living” plan was conceptualized to be more dynamic than typical static business initiatives — and to enable the two partners to adapt as technologies, circumstances and demands change over time.

“Back then, and even to an extent now, Transcom has had some of the same challenges — stovepiped systems and data, and getting it all together. So, the idea was for Lincoln to help us assess data architectures and to build flexible and robust planning tools, and analytics that would tie planning and analysis together, and propose cross-cutting solutions to that,” DeLapp explained. 

“And what’s happened over time is there have been projects where Lincoln has worked with our air component, Air Mobility Command, on predictive maintenance. They’ve worked with our J6 [command, control, communications and computer systems directorate] in the cyber area. They’ve worked with the J2 [intelligence directorate] in characterizing foreign influence using open-source information,” he said.

Lab officials don’t build and maintain the widgets or systems, but instead prototype technologies and then hand things off to the command or a vendor to fully produce and deploy them. 

“For example, in the air refueling area, our analysis models — with contested environments and all the new challenges — these models are being asked to do more. The model run times are getting slower. It’s getting harder to do them. So, we’ve brought Lincoln Labs on to go research and develop newer algorithmic approaches to speed up techniques and to speed up those algorithms. And then that will get handed off to the contractor that builds and updates it, and then they’ll take that and then incorporate it into the model,” DeLapp said.

In fiscal 2020, the command asked MIT researchers to conduct a comprehensive assessment to gauge which of its directorates were the most and least ready candidates to adopt AI and machine learning in tailor-made use cases.

“That was pretty telling because you can have all this technology, but if the directorate doesn’t know what data they have, or they don’t even know if that data exists, if they don’t even know what a tool can do and what it can’t do, or what it should do — then the time’s not right for you to just go and embrace that,” DeLapp noted.

Roots of the lab’s ongoing analytic and AI-enabling efforts for Transcom’s Surgeon General stem back to challenges pinpointed in that eye-opening assessment. Among its weighty, far-reaching responsibilities, the command serves as the Defense Department’s sole manager for global patient movement, which often involves the rapid and high-stakes transportation of ill and injured military personnel. 

The speed of conflict and urgency of such medical operations can make data-capture and processing typically more complex for Transcom in this context.

Spotlighting such challenges, Transcom public affairs official Erik Anthony told DefenseScoop: “There are some locations where we’ll get paper documentation for these individuals. So when you have even 10 patients moving — and then you do this at scale with thousands of patients — and you have medics running to an aircraft with papers, and then these papers have to make it to three other stops where they’re doing continuity of care.”

The patient movement mission set was identified during the lab assessment as potentially being well-suited for application of AI and ML technology. In fiscal 2021, MIT Lincoln Laboratory began working with the U.S. Transcom Command Surgeon to develop an AI-assisted routing tool to support that mission, he explained.

Now, that’s just one in a suite of tools the lab is developing and refining to facilitate the scalable handling of patient data, automate identification of key patient movements, and support planning for clinical and air assets.

“The Mass Casualty Operations Toolkit — MASCOT — uses [AI and ML] to enhance accuracy, improve workflows, and provide critical insights for both routine patient transport and mass casualty events,” Anthony said.

Once prototyped, the outputs can go on to be maintained as separate tools or used as a specification for incorporation into the Transcom Regulating and Command and Control Evacuation System.

According to Anthony, by applying natural language processing and large language modeling in their toolkit, the lab will assist the patient movement community “in reducing their cognitive load when processing patient movement requests resulting in reduced errors and faster decisions, allowing for increased velocity of patient movement operations.”

“This effort seeks to aid clinicians and airlift planners in decision-making, focusing on addressing operational needs for effective medical transport, particularly during a mass casualty response,” he said.

Another in-development tool in the MASCOT arsenal is what officials referred to as a synthetic patient generator.

“When command officials do exercises, they’ll go ‘We want to exercise some conflict. How are we going to move all these thousands of patients?’ Well, what type of patients are they? They’ve all got different requirements and some have different demands on critical care teams. So, if you want to really exercise that, you’ll want to have a capability to be able to generate a variety of patients, and not just do that manually. So the lab is building that out,” DeLapp said. 

This generator capability produces realistic synthetic patient data tied to computer-based scenarios. 

“When there’s a conflict — [with] the pace and the need — you’re going to need tools like that to be able to address those challenges,” he noted.

Up next

In DeLapp’s view, the long-term, flexible nature of the Living Plan is key to enabling the lab and command to access a combination of capabilities that are targeted for — but rapidly evolve with — its complex mission set.

“Because one of the benefits, again, of this partnership and the length of it, is that some of the people on the lab staff have been familiar with [staff like] the Surgeon General — and their processes and their challenges — for several years now, and then also they know where they can help in other areas,” he told DefenseScoop.

Command officials’ next chance to test out the MASCOT suite of decision-support tools being developed and refined by the Massachusetts-based lab will occur later this month, during the Ultimate Caduceus 2025 (UC25) exercise. The event — which is designed to test Transcom’s ability to conduct medical evacuations in both the field and computer-simulated settings — will be hosted in multiple locations this year, including at Travis Air Force Base in California.

“MIT Lincoln Laboratory will generate the patient data based on requirements from the UC25 exercise planners. In the future, this capability will be provided as a tool that planners can use directly,” Anthony said regarding the in-the-works synthetic patient generator.

Another tool in the pipeline for the exercise will streamline patient movement request data reviews at the Transcom Patient Movement Requirements Center.

There’s also a variety of other projects under the Living Plan umbrella that span beyond the command’s medical portfolio.

For one, Lincoln researchers are essentially helping officials in Transcom’s Air Operations Center (AOC) gain capacity to pull key datapoints from massive volumes of instant messages shared between personnel in real-world operations to inform senior leaders.

“A flight manager will chat a message to the crew and the crew will message a chat back. That’s thousands and thousands of chats. So the AOC is working on trying to, one, collect all that, and then two, make sense of all that. And using natural language processing and some generative AI, [they aim to] collect and gain insights into maybe something’s going on in one part of the world — like a runway that is flooded — and it’ll more rapidly inform the senior decision-makers that there’s a problem out there,” DeLapp said. 

“They’re doing that prototyping work and then handing it off to one of the Air Force software factories who then build it out,” he told DefenseScoop.

Due to the unique nature of the initiative, TCAC must evaluate projects to sponsor under the Living Plan each year. DeLapp’s team is now gearing up for their fiscal 2027 review.

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Transcom commander Air Force Gen. Randall Reed — who took charge about six months ago — shared new details this week about that work and related efforts to expand communications with the command’s military and industry partners as they collectively confront navigation-related risks.

“The Houthis behaving the way they are changes a little bit of [our] behavior from the standpoint that a threat actually exists — and they’re projecting a threat continuously. So, understanding that that’s the case now, you do have to pay attention to that and then see what you can do to actually get around that,” Reed told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the Sea-Air-Space summit. 

The Yemen-based group has launched hundreds of one-way attack drones and missile assaults against U.S. and other nations’ military and commercial vessels since October 2023. Houthi leaders have indicated that the operations largely mark their protest to America’s support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

U.S. Central Command has responded with deadly strikes against the Houthis.

Recent maritime data indicates that companies have rerouted their ships to longer sea lanes that require much more transit time, as a result of this conflict. 

Prior to taking the helm as Transcom’s commander last year, Reed — a command pilot with more than 3,500 flight hours — led a numbered air force, wing, expeditionary operations groups, and a flying training squadron. He’s also held a variety of joint, headquarters, and base-level roles. 

“I mention frequently to folks that logistics, inherently, is a world of disruption, and so something is going to happen somewhere to take you off plan,” Reed said. “There’s always another path. We’re always fighting for multiple ways to get things done.”

What’s unique about the contemporary challenges in and around the Red Sea, he noted, is that Transcom’s close commercial partners that enable some of its most vital mobility missions could be affected, and therefore need to remain informed.

“We have an established structure where we get together twice a year, at least — but when the need arises, we get together to address an issue. In this case, it’s the Red Sea. And so we will gather as much as required. And for a while there, it was about every two weeks where there was information-sharing,” Reed told DefenseScoop. 

“We would let them know what we knew. We would let them know the nature of the conflict as we saw it. We would get their concerns, and we would work together to make adjustments so that they could still [operate],” he explained.

A range of military officials connect and exchange information and data with industry leaders and representatives through this hub, which is referred to as Transcom’s “executive working group.”

“As things start out, there’s a level of sharing of understanding — and so folks just share what they know. We get an idea of what the environment is, we talk about the nature of the requirements or the needs, and then if there’s something to overcome, or some adjustment that needs to be made, we discuss that. Then, from there, it’s just professionals having a professional discussion about doing the profession,” Reed said.

During his keynote presentation at Sea-Air-Space, the general noted how, for the American military, logistics and sustainment have presented long-standing challenges for centuries. Now, however, those operations are happening in environments that are becoming more contested.

“In the Red Sea today, we have sailors — both active duty and civilian — who are sailing in harm’s way … and there’s some things that we need to change. So, from a Transcom perspective, this is one reason why you hear us being very vocal about returning to the oceans. This is one reason, when [President Donald Trump] mentioned that we were going to stand up [a U.S. ship-building support] office to figure out this problem, that all of us in this room got a little bit more excited. We all know that there’s several aspects to this. And you will find in me no greater champion and supporter to build for America, to establish supply chains that we depend on, to encourage the generations behind us to take the seas to sail and to help my shipmates get everything that they need to have,” Reed told the audience.

In the interview with DefenseScoop, he confirmed that his speech marked the first time that a keynote address had been delivered by a Transcom commander at the annual Sea-Air-Space summit.

“This is our first time. And before we do any keynotes, we spend a lot of time figuring out — who are we spending time with and why are they taking a chance on having us? And so, part of what we were able to determine and harvest, as was discussed earlier this week here, is that there is now a different national conversation in progress on maritime power,” Reed said.

“Obviously, that is a huge bulk of the capability that Transcom provides, although it’s not just organically, but with the commercial industry as well. And so everything that is currently swelling, we are right in the middle of it. We’ve been there, we’ve discussed it all along. And so, we have a lot to contribute,” he told DefenseScoop.

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“A lot of the ground units now have tactical [unmanned aerial systems, or UAS] that they might bring in,” the official said during an off-camera briefing at the Pentagon.

On the condition of anonymity, they and another top defense official took questions from the media regarding the Defense Department’s first official statement about how its components plan to rapidly respond to President Donald Trump’s executive mandates to tighten security at America’s southern border with the support of the U.S. military. 

The press briefing marked the first at the Pentagon since Trump re-entered office Monday, and it was attended by some of his administration’s first political appointees to trickle into the five-sided building. Border security was a major tenet of the president’s campaign commitments in the lead-up to this election and previously in 2016.

Acting Secretary of Defense Robert Salesses issued a statement Wednesday revealing the department’s immediate plans for the expedited implementation of Trump’s executive orders pertaining to the border — including the employment of U.S. military forces for “directed missions.” 

U.S. Northern Command is the operational lead for this multifaceted initiative, and Transportation Command and other elements of the services have been called on to assist. Teams from the Department of Homeland Security and the National Guard Bureau are also working in partnership with DOD to execute the administration’s vision.

Salesses confirmed in the statement that he officially approved the Pentagon’s plans to augment troops at the southwest border with orders for roughly 1,500 additional ground personnel, plus helicopters with associated crews, and teams of intelligence analysts to enhance “detection and monitoring” pursuits. 

Further, he announced that DOD will supply military airlift for DHS deportation flights of more than 5,000 people who were detained by Customs and Border Protection in specific California and Texas sectors. The department will also aid in constructing temporary and permanent physical barriers to help counter illicit border crossings. 

During the press briefing, the senior defense official emphasized: “This is the initial effort that we can do right away, and then we anticipate many additional missions after this. This is just the start.” 

The additional troops will consist of 1,000 soldiers and 500 Marines who are going to join about 2,500 military personnel already deployed in border operations, the senior defense official said, adding at the time of the Wednesday afternoon briefing that the first of these EO-supporting missions was expected to begin over the following 24 to 48 hours. 

According to the senior military official, the Air Force is sending C-17s and C-130s to remove the DHS-detained deportees.

“We also anticipate that there could be some additional airborne intelligence, surveillance and support assets that would move down to the border to increase situational awareness,” they said.

In response to reporters’ questions, the officials confirmed that military leaders are considering the deployment of tactical UAS to complement troops’ efforts on the ground near Mexico.

“They can provide localized intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in their particular area. Obviously, the Army’s got MQ-1s, Air Force has MQ-9s, over various times in the past provided some level of support. And then you have manned platforms that could fly in support as well. So, that is still not fully decided yet. We’re waiting to refine what the requirement is working with NorthCom on that — but we’ll let you know as soon as we’ve dubbed it out a bit,” the military official said.

Under DOD’s current drone policy, the military can perform UAS operations domestically in support of a request from federal or state civilian authorities, but only with the defense secretary’s explicit approval. 

The guidance also states that the military can only deploy armed drones in the U.S. for training, exercise, and testing purposes.

A defense spokesperson said on Wednesday that they could not immediately answer DefenseScoop’s questions regarding any potential governmentwide or DOD policy changes associated with domestic U.S. military drone flights.

NorthCom spokespersons did not respond to requests for more information by publication on Thursday.

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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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Last year, Joint Force Headquarters-DOD Information Network — a subordinate headquarters under U.S. Cyber Command responsible for protecting and defending the Pentagon’s network globally — became the coordinating authority for Transcom. This coordinating authority provides each supported combatant command with a single commander who is responsible for planning, synchronizing and coordinating cyber support and operations.

Previously, the service cyber components to Cybercom — through what is known as their Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber — were the only organizations that had coordinating authority in cyber for combatant commands they supported.

Transcom is responsible for logistics and getting equipment around the world, coordinating with both military and commercial entities. As such, cybersecurity is of the utmost importance to the command given the private partners it works closely with.

In this new role, JFHQ-DODIN works with Transcom to understand its key missions and terrain to improve its cyber posture and ensure materials are delivered from point A to B.

“We can’t secure everything, so knowing the mission thread, knowing what Transcom needs to be able to move X piece of equipment from base A to Port B, what is the mission threat it’s going to take to get there? Therefore, I can make sure that along that mission threat, I secure the key cyber terrain that supports that mission,” Brig. Gen. Heather Blackwell, deputy commander of JFHQ-DODIN, said during a presentation at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore on June 26.  

Blackwell and others have noted this coordinating authority is a natural progression for JFHQ-DODIN to support Transcom given the command doesn’t conduct offensive operations.

“It is a natural connection because Transcom doesn’t have an offensive mission … We’re defense only. To be able to be that coordinating authority for Transcom as a voice into Cyber Command is a perfect alignment,” she told DefenseScoop in an interview at the conference.

The other Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber organizations are responsible for offensive and defensive operations. If JFHQ-DODIN needs offensive support, it can leverage the larger Cybercom enterprise it’s part of to help.

 “Some of the things that Transcom will require are still outside of our purview, like for example, my authorities end at the DODIN. Transcom might need additional things off DODIN. But as the coordinating authority, we can take that requirement into Cyber Command and use Cyber Command’s authorities to help with some of that,” Blackwell told DefenseScoop, adding in remarks before the conference audience that if there is intelligence that a crucial port is being targeted by an adversary, they can call for offensive cyber help.

Now, JFHQ-DODIN and Transcom have worked to integrate their overall plans for stronger coordination.

“Aligning Transcom’s campaign plan with our campaign plan for global logistics and doing that overlay will make sure that we’re focusing on the unity of action in this space,” Blackwell said.

The two organizations held a global logistics summit last week at Cybercom with Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, JFHQ-DODIN commander, and Lt. Gen. John Sullivan, the deputy commander for Transcom.

Participants went through several vignettes and mission threads to understand what Transcom requires to perform its mission. With the understanding of what Transcom needs, JFHQ-DODIN can then better apply its capabilities and intelligence to understand what systems adversaries could be targeting and what might be vulnerable to remediate them.

“What we’re doing collectively is we’re highlighting the cybersecurity within the logistics arena … As companies are moving logistics across the world, we need to make sure that we are emphasizing that cybersecurity of the data so that we can ensure that it makes it to where it’s going,” Col. Jessica Haugland, chief of global logistics at JFHQ-DODIN and the organizer of the summit, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the conference.

Blackwell said that following the summit, they have action items they’ll be pursuing, such as whether to conduct another tabletop exercise and make sure the mission threads are secure, both from a cyber resiliency perspective and from a Transcom perspective.

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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 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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Multiple Defense Department components recently merged together to form the CDAO and ultimately help accelerate the adoption and widespread integration of data- and AI-driven capabilities across the enterprise. As they hash out their path forward as one unit, officials involved are also jointly applying what their teams learned deploying technologies to address national security challenges over the last few years — namely in the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Russia-Ukraine conflict — to help the government better prepare for future catastrophes.

“At the CDAO, I think we have a real opportunity to be able to support our warfighters in crises and we’re really uniquely positioned to do that. We have the ability to connect data dots across the department, whether that’s looking at logistics, financials, personnel operations or intelligence,” Deputy CDAO for Enterprise Capabilities Greg Little said last week.

Little joined Deputy CDAO for Warfighter Support Joe Larson, Deputy CDAO for Digital Services Katie Olson and TRANSCOM Operational Delivery Team Lead Jeff Clark for a virtual panel during DOD’s annual digital and AI symposium. 

“I think one of the important lessons that I learned in undertaking crises and deploying teams in times of crisis is not to sacrifice user-design, and sometimes you have to go slow in order to go fast,” Olson noted during the discussion.

Olson served as the Defense Digital Sevice’s acting director before the office was restructured under the CDAO. During that time and early into the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the State Department asked DDS to very quickly identify two decades’ worth of Afghan allies who had worked for America, digitize that information and make it available to State to process visas of those requesting asylum status. 

Government tech officials building tools to support rapidly shifting and tense situations should be deliberate about “putting the users first” and completely thinking through the core of what must be solved, Olson said.

“So in that instance, what we did is we said, ‘OK, who is the single source of truth for whether or not someone worked for us in Afghanistan?’ Well, it’s the employers. It’s the people that the U.S. government contracted with to do work for us in Afghanistan. So, what if we found a way for the employers to be the people providing verification?” Olson explained. “We reached out to companies that we’ve contracted with in Afghanistan, and we built a portal so that as people applied to the State Department would automatically ping employers who had employed our Afghan allies and partners over the past 20 years.”

Among other topics, TRANSCOM’s Clark also highlighted how data access, quality and processes are typically compromised during fast-moving crises. 

During the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, his team supported the evacuation of 124,000 people from the Middle Eastern nation in 70 days. To do so, Clark noted, officials involved “made shortcuts into the underlying systems to track that information, so the data was in fact slower than the operation was going on.” He’d get calls notifying him that “fixes” were made to tracking processes at certain times just to move people safely, which “led to shortcomings of the data on the other side.”

Clark mentioned other examples where officials “did the right thing to expedite the process,” but ultimately introduced data quality-related issues that caused the misinterpretation of real events happening on the ground — including one that recently left a four-star general disoriented over complex flight patterns. 

“That’s all informed the Ukraine process,” he noted. 

The Pentagon officials agreed that looking forward, the DOD must be strategic about implementing a more robust data-centered infrastructure that it can turn to for immediate interoperability and insights right when any sort of crises occur, as opposed to in their aftermath.

“We’re working on a federated data catalog to be able to just understand where our data is, what the meaning of that data is and what is the type of data that we have that will be able to answer the type of question,” Little noted. 

Though he didn’t provide many details, Little said the CDAO is also partnering with companies to pinpoint better application programming interface capabilities to enable deeper data-sharing across new and legacy architectures — and, separately producing an ontology associated with data quality. 

“We need to have the right infrastructure and tooling in the first place, so that in times of crisis we’re not getting sloppy with the data that we’re collecting and managing and using, but we’re feeding clean data into usable formats that are easily consumed and so that we can get the job done that we need to — whether that’s rectifying flight manifests or ensuring the quality of the vaccine data, for example,” Olson said. 

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