Q&A: Major General James L. Hodge
Written by Jeff McKaughan
MLF 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 2 (March)
Deployment and Distribution Services
Commanding General
Military Surface Deployment
and Distribution Command
He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1978 and was commissioned in the Transportation Corps. He holds master’s degrees in systems management from the University of Southern California and strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. His military education includes the Transportation Officer Basic and Advanced Courses, the Opera tional Research and Systems Analysis Military Applications Course, the Army Command and General Staff College, and the Defense Language Institute. Hodge’s command positions include: commander, 100th Transportation Company, Fort Eustis, Va.; commander, 64th Forward Support Battalion, 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Carson, Colo.; commander, Division Support Command, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Ga., and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq; deputy commanding general, Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Com mand, Fort Eustis; and most recently, commanding general, Army Materiel Command Southwest Asia and G-4, United States Army Central Command, Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.
He has also served in a variety of multifunctional logistics assignments to include: platoon leader; instructor, Transportation and Aviation Logistics School, Fort Eustis; personnel systems research analyst and assignments officer, U.S. Army Personnel Command, Alexandria, Va; executive officer and S-4, 99th Forward Support Battalion, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (Light), Fort Lewis, Wash; transportation staff officer, U.S. European Command, Germany; transportation corps representative, the Officer Personnel Management System XXI Task Force, Alexandria, Va; assistant chief of staff, G-4, 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Hood, Texas; chief, Logi stics Plans Division, U.S. Central Command, Mac- Dill Air Force Base, Florida and Camp As Salayah, Qatar; executive officer to the commanding general, Army Materiel Command, Fort Belvoir, Va.
Personal awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit (with Oak Leaf Cluster), the Bronze Star Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), the Meritorious Service Medal (with five Oak Leaf Clusters), the Army Commendation Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster), the Army Achieve ment Medal, the Combat Action Badge, and the Parachutist Badge.
Q: Good afternoon General Hodge. I would like to open up our discussion with an overview of SDDC, and role the command plays in the Defense Transportation System.
A: We are the Defense Department’s manager for surface movements to include planning, booking, shipping, tracking cargo and conducting port operations. Simply put, our mission is to provide global surface deployment and distribution services to meet our nation’s objectives. The SDDC team is more than 4,600 strong and includes active and reserve uniformed service members, civilians and contractors. Our presence is global and our footprints can be found in 79 locations worldwide, which is why I always say, ‘The sun never sets on SDDC.’
SDDC is an extremely interesting command and due to its functional nature, a bit unique from other Army commands. As happy and excited as I was to be a member of the 1977 Army football team that beat Navy and won the commander in chief’s trophy, I’m even more excited to be part of the SDDC team. I absolutely love this job and each day, I feel privileged to lead this organization.
In a nutshell, we move cargo, provide in-transit visibility [ITV] for our movements; and provide defense transportation engineering. Along with these core competencies, we are responsible for managing DoD’s container management and household goods programs. We are also the executive agent for the Army’s logistics over the shore capabilities, and a force provider for U.S. Transportation Command’s Joint Task Force – Port Opening [JTF-PO]. In that role, SDDC commands and controls three rapid port opening elements, or RPOE. The cargo movement function is expansive and involves road, rail and vessel moves. In addition to the actual movements, we are the single port manager for DoD common user ports and we operate cargo ports worldwide where vessel loading and unloading is done.
Our command and control relationship is unique because we report to USTRANSCOM operationally and the Army Materiel Command administratively. This means we bridge the gap between USTRANSCOM’s Joint Deployment and Distribution Enterprise and the Army’s Materiel Enterprise. This unique relationship puts us in a position to ensure the transportation system supporting DoD is optimally synchronized with one of its largest users—AMC.
Interestingly, we procure more than $1.8 billion annually in commercial truck, rail, barge, pipeline and ocean transportation services. Really, our success is achieved by leveraging the capability of the commercial transportation industry and military assets to create an efficient and effective flow of cargo.
As an example, when the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, we sent an advance team of eight people within two days to prepare for follow-on forces that delivered and distributed humanitarian supplies and equipment to the nation. As you remember, the Port-au-Prince seaport was destroyed, and their airport was overwhelmed in the initial days after the earthquake. SDDC played a significant role in getting these facilities up and running again. We worked with the other services and commercial carriers and contracted for multiple movements of high-priority relief supplies to the nation. Simultaneously, we deployed both our 688th and 689th RPOEs supporting USTRANSCOM’s JTF-PO mission. This lean and rapid-moving capability supports the opening of key air and sea nodes essential in opening distribution lanes. We provide the surface experts to that team through our RPOEs.
Also, in 2009, we were instrumental in the import and export of more than 12 million square feet of unit cargo in support of combat operations. Of that, we shipped more than seven and a half million square feet of cargo to the U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility using 134 vessels. Additionally, SDDC’s military ocean terminal at Sunny Point, N.C., has shipped over 90 percent of all ammunition used in OIF and OEF.
Q: How does a relatively small command—people-wise—succeed in its global mission of moving DOD equipment, cargo, and household goods?
A: Granted, we are small—but mighty. As I mentioned, we have more 4,600 people assigned to, or war-traced to SDDC. Although an Army organization, we only have around 370 active duty servicemembers. Notice I did not refer to our active duty servicemembers solely as soldiers, because SDDC has a joint flavor and includes authorized billets for sailors, airmen, coast guardsmen, and Marines.
Our civilian workforce is comprised of more than 1,300 civilians consisting of federal employees, contractors, and local nationals. Our Reserve forces, which are nearly half of our available force strength, are mostly assigned to our Deployment Support Command [DSC] and out of that, roughly 450 are always activated, supporting warfighters around the world.
Q: Exactly how do the bulk of Reservists contribute to SDDC?
A: We rely heavily on our Reserve teammates for our success, especially during this persistent state of conflict. The Army Reserve DSC, headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., is one of the newest operational and functional commands born out of the Army’s transformation. It consolidates all Army Reserve surface mobility units under a single command. The DSC’s mission is to provide command, control, and technical supervision of all SDDC aligned Army Reserve units performing terminal, rail, and deployment and distribution support missions and functions to include end-to-end distribution support. Currently, a mobilized Army Reserve battalion manages and operates the port of Shuaiba, the largest military cargo seaport operation on the globe.
I briefly mentioned we manage containers used to ship cargo to and from theaters. These containers must be managed not only as tools for moving cargo, but also as real property. This is a huge undertaking and over the past three years our mobilized Reserve units have led the way, managing the in-theater database that tracks containers and training units on how to account for and use these assets. Since we often use commercially owned containers, emphasis is placed on reducing detention costs for containers in OIF and OEF theaters.
There’s a good news story here in that our process improvements are paying off for us and we have realized lower monthly estimated detention costs, and the bulk of this work has been done with a heavy reliance in our Reserve Command.
Q: A few years ago, the command’s name changed to the Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command. How has that affected your mission?
A: There was a very good reason to change the name in 2004, because our mission was expanding. Our name now more accurately reflects what we do for the warfighter.
Most people will remember our previous name, Military Traffic Management Command [MTMC], with its heritage starting in 1974. MTMC focused on the traffic management piece of cargo movement. While very important, our modern role requires a broader end-to-end focus and provides much more than just management expertise. Our primary responsibility then was ensuring cargo and container movements from CONUS ports to overseas ports and it basically ended there. As you can see, we’ve come a long way since those days.
Remember I said our mission is to provide global surface deployment and distribution solutions. Instead of just a port-toport responsibility, the breadth of our mission has expanded to port-to-door, and has grown now to include moving cargo door-to-door.
Another recent addition to the SDDC family is our RPOEs, which are specialized teams assigned to our 597th Transportation Group. In late October, we stood up our third RPOE at Fort Eustis. Our RPOEs are an integral part of our JTF-PO responsibility. In addition to our RPOEs, our groups and battalions are engaged in developing deployment and distribution support team capability to lead the JTF-PO SPOD [seaport of debarkation] mission.
Q: I understand you rely on a variety of programs that provide you with in-transit visibility of every piece of cargo you move. What technological strides have you recently made to advance your surface transportation process, and what do you foresee for the future?
A: It doesn’t do much good to move something if we cannot tell the warfighter where it is at any given point in time. That’s where we rely heavily on technology, and we have committed ourselves to improving this aspect of our mission. We, as a command, have to advance as technology advances, and at times be the impetus for those advances.
The biggest initiative in this arena is a program developed by our own global surface transportation experts, called ISDDC. That stands for Integrated Surface Distribution Data Cleansing Tool. This system takes data from a variety of source systems, both commercial and military, used throughout the Joint Deployment and Distribution Enterprise, and integrates the information into a single robust reporting capability.
For example, an ISDDC user can identify the location of a commercial ship, determine its course and estimated arrival at the port of debarkation, then drill-down to the specific cargo onboard. We have found this to be a very valuable capability for our group, battalion, and command operations center personnel, who have embraced the use of ISDDC as part of their daily battle rhythm for planning and executing movements.
ISDDC is our primary information technology tool in executing one of our three core competencies: providing 100 percent in-transit visibility to our customers. But that isn’t as straight forward as it sounds. Different parts of the world, different business practices, different commodities and different data sources have to be combined together and integrated to complete the ITV picture. ISDDC does the heavy lifting, so our customers don’t have to. For example, ISDDC is taking events from our manifesting system, our freight system, our booking system, and combining that with RFID pings. In some cases, SDDC receives raw carrier data and transforms it into standardized ITV transactions, such as reporting events for cargo moving along the Northern Distribution Network and Pakistan route into Afghanistan.
Recently, we’ve expanded our ITV data sources to include the receipt and integration of satellite tag data, requiring no fixed infrastructure to work, and also the use of container intrusion detection device RFID tags that provide real-time updates when containers are tampered with or experience temperature changes.
Another outstanding capability is available in our Intelligent Rail/Road Information System, aka IRRIS. In IRRIS, you can subscribe to e-mail alerts to be notified when cargo reaches a specified area on the map. As an example, I recently Geo-fenced Kandahar, and got a message in my inbox telling me when critically required M-ATVs [mine resistant ambush protected all terrain vehicles] had reached their destination.
The real benefit is to our customer, the warfighter, who needs that information.
Q: Can you tell me more about the Transportation Engineering Agency’s [TEA] role in SDDC?
A: TEA is the engineering side of SDDC. The agency’s role is to improve the global deployability and sustainment of our armed forces, and they do this by providing DoD with transportation engineering, policy guidance, research and analytical expertise to support the national military strategy. They use state-of-the-art computational and analytical tools, as well as the most advanced information system technologies to satisfy our customer’s total force projection needs.
As you know, today we live in a global environment where our national military strategy is built on our ability to rapidly deploy, project, and sustain our armed forces anywhere in the world. These force projection goals are constantly evolving and becoming ever more demanding. That’s where TEA comes in, by supporting these requirements with timely and accurate deployment and surface distribution- related analyses and transportation engineering solutions. The agency is also responsible for Highways for National Defense, which is identifying the minimum public highway infrastructure that DoD needs to fulfill its mission, then integrating these public highway needs into civil policies, plans and programs. They also ensure the defense readiness capability of public highway infrastructure and establish policy on how DoD uses the public highway system.
Also under the Highways for National Defense is our Defense Access Road Program, or DAR. This program provides the legal means for DoD to pay its fair share for public highway improvements that are made necessary by sudden or unusual defensegenerated impacts where we would not reasonably expect state and local authorities to plan for them in their normal highway improvement programs. Funding DAR projects is the responsibility of the military services through their military construction programs.
TEA is also responsible for the Railroads for National Defense. They ensure the readiness capability of the national railroad network to support defense deployment and peacetime needs. Ports for National Defense is another area you’ll find TEA involved in, with the primary goal to ensure the identification, adequacy, and responsiveness of defense-important CONUS port infrastructure in both peacetime and wartime.
We spoke earlier about technology tools—TEA developed and manages the web database IRRIS. IRRIS is a web-based program for transporters and commercial carriers that retrieves data about U.S. highways, bridges, traffic, military installations and seaports. [IRRIS] can access multiple military databases, bringing a big picture overview to the customer for them to make relevant decisions regarding their mission and transportation needs.
TEA is also responsible for traffic engineering, which improves highway safety and reduces traffic congestion on DoD installations. Along with everything else, they are responsible for deployability of military materiel to include transportation engineering research, and analytical expertise to improve the deployability of U.S. armed forces. This also helps ensure equipment moves safely and efficiently by current or future transportation assets. Their Deployability Division conducts transportation engineering analyses of multi-modal nodes and networks that support power projection. The division also helps shape the military by using sophisticated modeling, simulation, engineering and analysis to provide deployability solutions. As you can see, TEA is invaluable to our Defense Transportation System.
Q: SDDC recently launched a new household goods program for DoD called the Defense Personal Property Program or DP3. How is that going?
A: DP3 is rolling out well and promises to be a great program, with additional benefits that have been long overdue. We remain committed to make everyone’s move a better experience and provide the kind of benefits you would find in the corporate sector.
As you know, relocating can be one of the most stressful events in a person’s life, and the military is the largest moving population in the United States. Historically, we manage more than 500,000 household goods shipments every year, at a cost of more than $2.2 billion.
One of the most significant features of DP3 is that servicemembers have a direct impact in determining the quality of movers they and their fellow servicemembers receive. Customers are able to complete an assessment of their move in a short 12-question customer satisfaction survey, or CSS. The scores are used to rank moving companies, awarding top performing companies with more shipments.
The CSS is a critical piece of this program, but it does require participation. In order for servicemembers and their families to realize the benefits, they must take the time to complete the survey. At the heart of this program is a web-based system called DPS or Defense Personal Property System. This system, managed by USTRANSCOM, is the heart of DP3.
DPS is a next-generation, fully-integrated, centralized webbased system for the management of personal property shipments for DoD. The DPS customer-centric approach provides a more responsive, user-friendly experience, while ensuring timely and accurate delivery of personal property shipments. It also provides direct customer feedback to identify and reward transportation service providers/carriers that deliver quality service at reasonable rates.
The more our servicemembers, DoD civilians and family members know about DP3 and how it works, the better we’ll be able to make their move experience. Our new system really puts customers in the driver’s seat by allowing them to manage their personal property moves.
This new system provides the capability to self-counsel online from any computer with internet access around the clock, seven days a week. Once a servicemember or federal employee receives their PCS orders, they or their family members can estimate their household goods weight, enter relevant information, request pick-up and delivery dates, and let their prospective mover know of unique items that require special attention—all without going to a transportation office. Once their move is complete, they can file claims as necessary for damaged or missing items.
Another very important benefit we built into DP3 is full replacement value, or FRV, which drastically improves the coverage for one’s personal property. Under the previous program, a transportation service provider was only liable for the depreciated value of a household item that was damaged or lost, not the cost to repair or replace it. With FRV, the provider has the option to either repair the item to the same condition it was in prior to the move, or replace it with a like-value item. If an item is lost or destroyed, the provider must replace it with a like-value item. FRV provides up to a maximum of $50,000, depending upon the shipment weight and the method of the move.
We are really excited about DP3 because it represents a new era of household goods movement. We have a Website where more information is housed: www.move.mil.
Q: What do you see as your biggest challenge in the immediate future?
A: Moving the command while moving America’s military might is a challenge. My goal is to do it seamlessly so no one outside SDDC even notices we moved our headquarters and our operations center while supporting global movements for the warfighter.
We are a command in transition as a result of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission’s [BRAC] decision to relocate SDDC from two locations—Alexandria and Fort Eustis, Va.—to Scott Air Force Base, Ill. The SDDC headquarters elements that used to be in Alexandria, Va., have completely moved to Scott AFB. The Defense Transportation Tracking System Program Management Office recently completed its move to Scott from Norfolk, Va.
The remaining piece of our BRAC relocation is to relocate those elements that have already moved to Scott from their temporary location into the new SDDC headquarters, and to move our operations from Fort Eustis to Scott AFB. We are on schedule to move into our new headquarters building next to USTRANSCOM before the end of this fiscal year.
Q: Do you have any final thoughts?
A: Well I can’t leave this discussion without recognizing our commercial partners. As I mentioned before, we don’t do this on our own. Although I run common user seaports around the world, I own no trucks, trains or vessels. We rely on our commercial partners to actually move the cargo. They do a marvelous job and the teamwork is impressive. I must also brag about the SDDC workforce.
SDDC is full of talented people who are committed, dependable and relentless in carrying out our global mission. I am extremely proud of them and will match their performance against any other organization, military or commercial. I consider myself privileged to lead these wonderful people and to command such an interesting and dynamic organization. ♦