SLD sat down with General McNabb, Commander USTRANSCOM, and his staff to discuss the role of TRANSCOM in current operations, with a special emphasis on Afghanistan and Haiti. This part of the interview focuses upon TRANSCOM and its operational approach. For those of us old enough to remember when there was not a TRANSCOM, we tend to think of the Air Mobility Command. We tend to focus on the airlift component for military supply. As such, our understanding is really limited concerning how TRANSCOM really executes the joint mission and balances its capabilities to deliver goods and troops to the globally deployed warfighter.
In this interview, General McNabb explains the TRANSCOM approach and highlighted three overall points:
- First, TRANSCOM is the Distribution Process Owner, or DPO, and has authority over the end-to-end delivery of kit and personnel. As such it is evolving data collecting techniques, shaping metrics and enhancing its ability to fuse data to understand options in delivering the capability to the warfighter. Transparency of data is a key requirement for full mission success.
- Second, TRANSCOM emphasizes multi-modal operations and processes, selecting the right mode(s) of transportation to meet warfighter needs.. The task is to balance efficiency and effectiveness. The command focuses on using commercial partners, military airlift, ground delivery or sealift options and looks for the optimal combination to deliver kit and personnel.
- Third, in determining options, TRANSCOM works tradeoffs among prioritization and speed of delivery, cost of delivery options, and security of supply. This triangle, in effect, is how choice is determined.
[slidepress gallery=’general-mcnabb-on-the-transcom-approach’]
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***Posted on May 21st, 2010