Air Force Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost is the commander of U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), one of the Department of Defense’s 11 Combatant Commands. Van Ovost oversees the military’s transportation and logistics enterprise, including airlift, aerial refueling, and sealift, using both military and commercial assets. Van Ovost discussed how TRANSCOM is preparing for a future in which its logistics are likely to be contested by an adversary and how the command will support military services’ plans for more distributed operations in the Pacific with Pentagon Editor Chris Gordon in an interview in September. This transcript has been edited for space.
Q: How comfortable are you with your ability to do contested logistics in the Pacific right now, and could you supply current American facilities if faced with Chinese interference?
A: Let’s just step back and think about how the strategic environment’s changed. … We used to say what we did was logistics math. You move items that have a weight, and maybe they’re hazardous, and maybe they’re people, and you would move them over here, and it’s a physics equation. You put them in a ship, it takes this long, plus the offload. You put them in an airplane takes this long, plus the offload. And we call that logistics math. If you ask me how long it will take a Brigade Combat Team moving from here to here, I can tell you. … In contested logistics, we expect that we will be disrupted. Our ability to communicate will be degraded or cut off completely at certain segments. And that is going to likely slow or change the options we have to move this from here to here. So it’s no longer straight math. … What we have to do is we have to provide options. My ability to do that planning now is good. I do planning all the time. … If the airplane breaks, we handle that. That’s normal friction that we do day to day.
With a persistent adversary who is determined to not let that Brigade Combat Team get to that location, it is going to be nonlinear and harder. … The adversary in the Pacific can reach out a lot farther than they used to be able to. … Our commercial partners, we’re probably not going to put them in a highly contested environment. So now I have to go to a location forward as far as possible using commercial capability. And then I have to offload and transload into a military-type capability that has an ability to stay connected through multiple means: resilience, has perhaps an ability to defend itself or has an ability to integrate with fires, with a package that’s going to protect it in some way—ISR, electronic warfare, shooters—to get to that last tactical mile. So it’s going to take longer and it may take more mechanisms to do that. Doing that at scale concerns me.
Q: How do you prepare analytically? Wargames, for example?
A: We do modeling and simulation, and we have a high-end analytical capability. … For example, we do modeling and simulation for, let’s say, delivering fuel in the Indo-Pacific to multiple locations, where we have to think about using commercial to a certain aspect, deep draft, and then using shallow draft to move between the first and second island chains because you can’t put a larger tanker there . … When you go into a seaport, it’s potentially a target. You just pull up to a berth and then you’re pretty much stuck there and you are a target. …. We maybe park the ship in a different area in the ocean and then other ships come up to it and get supplies off of it, and then move out so it’s farther away from an area that would most likely be targeted.
And we do that under what we think is a contested situation where maybe we don’t have any communications and we simulate what the delays would be—if you didn’t have communications or if you couldn’t go to this berth and you divert somewhere else, how much longer it takes to get there, thinking in a kinetic fight, you would be able to be targeted at a certain location based on certain weapons and certain probabilities, which the wargames have. … We do run those simulations over and over to see what’s the optimum route if you lost Country X—what’s the optimal route to move fuel or people or whatever, and what’s the optimal types of assets we would use, commercial [or] military.
Q: So, in the past, you might have two game plans, but now you want to have more?
A: More options. More robust routes and nodes and capacities from our commercial and military total force.
Q: If you want to have more options, do you need more capacity, especially because the existing sealift and airlift fleet is old?
A: The Next-Generation Air-refueling System is going to be sort of the first model where we’re going after real credible capacity in a high-end contested environment—which is the connectivity necessary, which is beyond line of sight [communications], more than one capability to be able to transmit, the battlespace awareness necessary for that crew to understand where’s red, where’s blue, do I have domain superiority right now, can I actually deliver to that location right now or where would I go if I can’t deliver into that location. And then an ability on board via either Collaborative Combat Aircraft or onboard systems that can provide defense for the type of weapon I expect to go against in that scenario. … So that’s what we’re looking for. … And then they’ll be part of a fleet that just has to manage the contested logistics with respect to cyber and space, which is ubiquitous. It will happen right from the airport we depart from or the seaport we depart from, or frankly, even from the port, getting on a rail that could be stopped.
Q: So contested logistics is not just about being direct-fires?
A: Let me just say that China is using their economic power as a weapon. … China is also a major maritime power. There’s a naval power and maritime power, and they’re usually connected. … So they’re building their Navy—carriers, destroyers. They’re also building up their maritime militia, which is fishing trawlers with equipment on board. … They have 8,000 ships. They’re delivering everything to everybody around the globe, including the United States. They’re buying up seaport management because they do logistics, they’re very good at it. …
They’ve locked up about 70 or 80 percent of the crane market, which are electronic, which take data about what’s being unloaded and offloaded and where it’s going. … They’re able to see. They have this God’s-eye view of what’s going on with logistics around the world so they know what a country depends on. They know a certain country depends on this much lithium, this much this resource, this much coal, whatever. And they can do things like intercept that.
Q: How do you address those issues?
A: The one thing that this nation is doing is they are trying to show the implications of what happens when you buy these kinds of systems or you allow China to run your port. … Several European nations have learned from this and are trying to extract themselves from China running part of their port or having software that’s running their port. We’re a little late to the game on this from a moral standpoint.
Q: How do support distant islands in the Pacific that the U.S. already has access to, such as Tinian, in line with services’ future operating concepts?
A: All of the services are about the same. In ACE [Agile Combat Employment], there are hubs and then there are spokes. A hub is more robust and the spokes are more austere. But even in the spokes when we have to rearm, refuel, perhaps repair, they have to have some capability to do that. We need to do things like forward positioning some key spare parts, some fuel. … That is more stuff to more places at a faster time. So there’s the balance of how much you want to put there versus how much needs to deliver on time.
Q: A common military problem is having a small thing that you keep adding to until it becomes a rather big thing. How do avoid that?
A: I love my Al Udeid in Qatar because we had a lot of airplanes, a lot of maintenance capability, but, you know, that’s not going to work in the Indo-Pacific. We cannot build that up. So I have to have assets that will be able to plug in … globally into the theater and then marry up with assets like C-130s, shallow draft, fast sealift ships that are going to be able to do the onward movement to those places like Tinian.
Q: How far away are we from this world that you just described?
A: I think that there’s some more work to do, certainly with forward posture and what’s the art of the possible. This is also about the people. They need to have the initiative and recognize they’re not always going to get the order. They have to act under mission command, meaning they have to understand the environment and if you’re cut off from everybody, what’s the best thing you can do right now to continue to move the mission? It’s not just about survivability. It’s about winning the mission. … We’ll need to do that because I know we’ll be cut off at some certain points.
Q: What lessons have you been able to draw from Ukraine?
A: We’ll start with readiness. … For our work with Ukraine, we have been blessed with a lot of commercial support. About 75 percent of our air sorties and sea vessels are commercial, have been for this support for Ukraine. And so we’ve been able to balance the organic readiness and keep them going and working on buildups for the high-end fight. … But when I think about what’s actually going on inside Ukraine and how Ukrainians have had to keep things on the move because there’s only so many entry points into Ukraine for logistics flow—so how do they have to repackage, move things quickly, use deception?
Even when we look at their airfields, they’re not going to park a bunch of airplanes next to each other, so that’s it’s easier to work on and it’s easier to refuel. They’re constantly moving them around and they’re moving around to different airfields. That means that if it’s a certain weapons system, you got people here to do that work and you have to have people there to do that work. And that’s what we’re trying to get with the Air Force, and that’s why Multi-Capable Airmen and the work they’re doing on ACE is so important. … You’re seeing what’s going on with the seaside with respect to attacks on the berthing in Odessa and the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure. We have to imagine that that’s going to occur at any nation in another fight.
Q: Do you need to increase your capabilities and infrastructure in the U.S.?
A: I’m working with NORTHCOM, and I think that [NORTHCOM Commander Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck] would say, yes, we have work to do. … He’s very focused on our power projection platforms, to mobilize and to get to the seaport, the rail to get to the seaport, the seaport itself, and the airport. For lots of reasons, we want to make sure that we have power, that we’re not cyberattacked … and I have multiple routes to get to those ports, so if I do lose something like a road or whatever, I can go another way. Protecting that is key, and that’s why I worked with the Department of Transportation on their resilience initiatives, the Department of Homeland Security, and NORTHCOM. …
What may work OK in training here over in the United States is not going to work in a highly contested environment. … It is a global perspective I have to take every day and to do that balance because, remember, we are also blocking Chinese aggression in the Middle East and in Africa. … We don’t dump and run. We have a conscious understanding of what integrated deterrence is around the globe, and how I assist the Chairman and the Secretary with that prioritization to ensure people have what they need to do their missions.