Q&A : General Duncan McNabb

Written by Christian Sheehy

LOGISTICS MOTIVATOR:
Providing the Direction and Resources in Support of Today’s Warfighter



General Duncan McNabb
Commander
U.S. Transportation Command

McNabb graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1974. A command pilot, he has amassed more than 5,400 flying hours in transport and rotary wing aircraft. He has held command and staff positions at squadron, group, wing, major command and Department of Defense levels. During operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, McNabb commanded the 41st Military Airlift Squadron, which earned Military Airlift Command’s Airlift Squadron of the Year in 1990.

McNabb’s staff assignments have been a variety of planning, programming and logistical duties. These include serving as the deputy chief of staff for Plans and Programs on the Air Staff and chairman of the Air Force Board having oversight of all Air Force programs. He also served as the director for logistics on the Joint Staff where he was responsible for operational logistics and strategic mobility support to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. Prior to his current assignment, he was vice chief of staff.

General McNabb was interviewed by MLF Editor Christian Sheehy.

Q: How do you see your job as the commander of U.S. Transportation Command?

A: I am privileged and honored to lead this team of the finest professional logisticians in the world—active duty, reservist, civilians and contractors. This unique and diverse team is a crown jewel in our national security capabilities—focused on and committed to serving as the lifeline for our deployed warfighters. USTRANSCOM and its components comprise a national asset when a crisis at home or abroad requires an immediate response. This team simply amazes me every day with what they accomplish.

My challenge and my obligation—to the team and to the nation—is to provide the direction and resources these professionals need to support our customers in the most precise and reliable way possible. My promise is to do everything I can to help them deliver on our promise to our customers without fail and all the while earning their complete trust.

Q: What is the mission of USTRANSCOM?

A: Our mission is to serve as the Department of Defense mobility joint force provider, single manager for transportation, single manager for patient movement, and as the DoD Distribution Process Owner [DPO].

USTRANSCOM delivers the warfighter an integrated, networked, end-to-end distribution capability to the right place, at the right time and at the best value for our nation. We implement Joint Deployment and Distribution Enterprise [JDDE] solutions in support of the president, the secretary of defense, U.S. geographic combatant commands, the military services, government agencies and coalition partners. As a supporting functional combatant command, we execute military and commercial air and surface transportation, terminal operations and management, aerial refueling and patient movement globally throughout the Defense Transportation System [DTS] in a wide range of military and humanitarian operations.

Our component commands—the Army’s Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command [SDDC], the Navy’s Military Sealift Command [MSC] and the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command [AMC]— together with our enterprise partners, deliver a strategic logistics and distribution capability that supports the warfighters’ ability to project combat power.

As the DPO, USTRANSCOM leads a collaborative effort within the JDDE to deliver innovative and cost-efficient solutions that increase the precision, velocity, reliability and visibility of our distribution network and the overall DoD supply chain. Through these efforts, USTRANSCOM continues to instill trust and confidence and keep our promises to our nation and to the warfighter.

Q: What are your focus areas in the coming months and year? A: This year, as we continue to focus on the global war on terror, USTRANSCOM and our components provide extraordinary capabilities for projecting national will across a wide range of military and humanitarian operations. Our strategic objectives are to support global operations and align the DoD global supply chain, both of which are designed to unify the JDDE and deliver value. We are the warfighter’s lifeline.

We will continue to mature the JDDE with our enterprise partners as we drive greater integration of our processes, business rules, tools, systems and even organizations. To those ends, we are pursuing strategic opportunities that will lead our enterprise to improve effectiveness, efficiency, as well as access to, and visibility of, distribution data.

Our goal is to deliver core DPO systems that standardize common distribution processes and information exchanges. We collaborate with our supply chain partners, including the services and the Defense Logistics Agency [DLA], to sharpen our information technology focus. An important DLA and USTRANSCOM IT initiative is the Integrated Data Environment [IDE]/Global Transportation Network [GTN] Convergence [IGC]. IGC is a DLA and USTRANSCOM partnership providing a single IT point of access to make informed supply chain decisions.

And we continue to push the envelope on in-transit visibility in our supply chain through Automatic Identification Technology [AIT] and Radio Frequency Identification [RFID]. We have developed an AIT implementation plan with the services, DLA and other agencies to fully incorporate AIT into our business processes. Although active RFID has served us many years and continues as the backbone of our efforts, we are expanding passive RFID and satellite technology for even greater confidence in our capability. Emerging passive RFID technology has shown great promise for us, based on successful trials in Alaska and Hawaii.

Closer to home, our Fusion Center connects critical teammates early in the planning process: the combatant commands, SDDC, AMC, MSC, DLA and other DoD partners. Fusion Center planning capitalizes on collaborative and synchronized efforts from across the JDDE to improve the sharing of tasks and workload, and shorten the coordination cycle. Early cooperation provides planners an enhanced view of requirements and increases decision-making capacity. The completion next year of a new addition to our headquarters building will bring fusion together with a co-located Joint Intelligence Operations Center, adding an enhanced ability for USTRANSCOM to identify and address threats to our intermodal operations worldwide at seaports and airfields and connecting surface transportation networks.

Q: What are the big challenges facing USTRANSCOM logistics planning and how is your organization addressing them?

A: Our challenge is to always be positioned to provide the nation and its combatant commanders with the best possible options for adaptive and effective solutions so they can respond successfully to an uncertain future, one that likely includes persistent cyber conflict, sometimes capricious access to air and sea ports, and energy challenges.

The Quadrennial Defense Review and National Defense Strategy envision the need for greater flexibility to contend with uncertainty by emphasizing agility, development of rapidly deployable capabilities for prompt global military action, and by planning and operating within the premise that forces will not likely fight in place. All of these assessments create challenges for our nation’s deployment and distribution enterprise.

We will shorten the time it takes to get forces to the fight; sustain deployed forces; support rapid force maneuver and patient movement; and finally, bring the forces home. As the DPO, we lead collaboration within the JDDE to improve distribution velocity, precision, reliability and efficiency.

A precise supply chain gets people, equipment and supplies to the warfighter at the right place at the right time using the mode or combination of modes that is the most efficient and effective. USTRANSCOM’s DPO Strategic Opportunities initiative is designed to improve precision by examining and aligning key strategic leverage points in the supply chain—striking the proper balance between inventory stocks and transportation volumes; aligning supply, transportation and distribution processes; and optimizing strategic surface and airlift networks. We have identified five specific strategic opportunities that, with coordinated actions among our supply chain partners, will help us dramatically reduce cost and improve service. By our estimate, we can save about $500 million in annual supply chain cost while increasing customer service levels up to 45 percent. The opportunities are based on common commercial supply chain practices, and we can initiate them quickly with minimal investment.

Q: How is USTRANSCOM working to boost partnering with private sector companies?

A: Clearly the Defense Transportation System relies on the right balance of organic and commercial lift. We are indeed partners with the private sector, and we can’t operate efficiently without them. The Civil Reserve Air Fleet [CRAF] program is key to our nation’s ability to project combat power. Wartime airlift requirements for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom [OIF/ OEF] help sustain our CRAF carriers. But the state of the U.S. airline industry raises concern about CRAF viability post OIF/OEF, especially for the smaller charter carriers. The CRAF Assured Business Initiative, as approved by Congress in the fiscal 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, is part of a larger strategy to ensure CRAF viability.

Under CRAF Assured Business, we can guarantee enough business for CRAF carriers to maintain this vital program. We will assign the contract award amounts proportionally to their relative commitments to the CRAF program. This initiative provides carriers with much needed predictable income allowing them to better plan fleet size, fleet mix, maintenance, manpower and costs.

We also continue to partner with commercial industry to meet sealift requirements through the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement [VISA]. VISA provides DoD with time-phased access to U.S.-flagged commercial dry cargo vessels, intermodal systems and infrastructure in return for peacetime business.

We have further strengthened our partnership with our private sector team through the Defense Transportation Coordination Initiative [DTCI], which uses a commercial third-party logistics provider to manage DoD freight movements in the continental United States. DTCI helps us improve reliability by leveraging the best in commercial capabilities for more efficient and economic delivery. This joint DLA, USTRANSCOM and DoD services program has matured rapidly, and it is now paying big dividends. DTCI now serves 11 DLA distribution centers and 11 shipping locations. It has a goal of a 96 percent on-time pick-up and delivery rate and will save an estimated $40 million to $50 million annually in transportation costs—approximately 15 percent savings. DTCI has already provided increased visibility of CONUS freight movements. The contract, awarded in 2007, is potentially worth $1.6 billion.

Q: What are some of the big successes that USTRANSCOM has had during the past year?

A: I am extremely proud of the great successes of USTRANSCOM’s Total Force Team. I’ve already mentioned some of our successes, but here are a few more, ranging from exploring options for new supply routes into Afghanistan to improving supply chain performance, as well using a fusion approach to best solve transportation challenges.

In support of USCENTCOM, we have, within the past few months, successfully explored ways to diversify ground supply routes into Afghanistan. As “distribution quarterback,” we created options for a Northern Distribution Network [NDN] of routes through Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia in support of USCENTCOM. We worked with USCENTCOM, U.S. European Command, U.S. Pacific Command and NATO to develop these transportation options and worked closely with the Department of State on making the NDN a reality.

New supply routes became necessary, not only because of recent attacks in the tribal regions of Pakistan, but because of challenging diplomatic issues and the forecasted increase of troops into Afghanistan. These circumstances are still evolving, so we know we still have more work to do. We are working on infrastructure upgrades and identifying and implementing ways to increase throughput on the NDN, as well as agreements with other countries for additional options. Our agreements emphasize the commercial nature of cargo flowing through the network.

Overall, we have been very successful in improving the efficiency across the distribution enterprise. Since fiscal year 2004, the DPO has reported $2.3 billion in total cost avoidance by leveraging forward stock positioning, using more efficient transportation modes, and expanding DTCI and other supply chain efficiencies—with substantial involvement by our distribution industry partners.

Partnering with DLA, we have concentrated much of our improvement efforts on the surface distribution pipeline to Kuwait, which is extremely significant because Kuwait is a major OIF distribution hub, and approximately 90 percent of the sustainment cargo shipped from the continental U.S. to the USCENTCOM area of operations moves by surface. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2006, 85 percent of requisitions moving by surface to Kuwait took more than 100 days. By the end of fiscal year 2008, we realized a 38 percent improvement and provided more reliable service, improved customer trust, and replenished forward location inventories.

The JDDE has also improved stock positioning, a driver of supply chain performance. From fiscal 2005 through fiscal 2008, we positioned 10 percent more at depots closer to the warfighter for better responsiveness and lower total supply chain cost.

We also saw great opportunity for increased efficiency at the “front end” in developing a Single Load Planning Capability [SLPC] so warfighters can create load plans for air and surface transport through a one-time entry into a single system. SLPC provides Internet collaboration; standalone operations in austere environments where no Internet connection is available; multiple sessions or windows for concurrent completion of multiple load and stow plans; drag and drop capability for easy transfer of cargo between conveyances; user-specific training; and automated expert agents with knowledge in specific domains, such as cargo placement, hazardous materials, trim and stability, and accessibility.

Across the enterprise and all of our improvement efforts, an undeniable key to success was improved distribution data visibility. Our work with the Common Operational Picture Distribution and Deployment [COP D2] and the Global Combat Support System-Joint [GCSS-J] program offices resulted in the Single Sign-On [SSO] capability, and improved access, efficiency and data security through the seamless integration between the COP D2 and GCSS-J systems. COP D2 also enhances end-to-end visualization of tracking of arms, munitions and explosives; critical Federal Emergency Management Agency information; and transportation node management.

Our JDDE now relies on our Fusion Center in planning distribution operations, and this approach has successfully created more efficient and economic multimodal solutions for our customers. One of the most visible fused operational successes was the milestone of delivering 13,600 mine resistant ambush protected [MRAP] vehicles to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Fusion Center logged another success when it synchronized critical lift operations for Operation Assured Delivery that supported the Republic of Georgia. The United States promised to transport Georgian troops home from Iraq within 72 hours if they were needed to protect their homeland—and USTRANSCOM ultimately delivered more than 1,800 Georgian soldiers to Tbilisi. Later, we delivered more than 22,000 humanitarian daily rations and about 974,000 pounds of relief supplies to assist Georgian refugees.

Q: How is USTRANSCOM helping to transform logistics processes in DoD?

Supply chain management is an inherently transformative process, and we’ve learned a great deal from commercial industry. In the process, we realized that no one in the world can do what we do with the level of success we achieve around the world, every day. Transformation relies, in part, on the tried-and-true processes of research and development and collaboration, and the relentless pursuit of new and better ways of operating.

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