‘You don’t get there unless you have the data’: Transcom taps Advana in real-world operations

U.S. Transportation Command’s primary data and decision-driving analytics asset Pegasus — which is an environment within the Pentagon’s enterprise Advana platform — was instrumental in the military’s recent accelerated withdrawal from Niger, supplying officials with a comprehensive view into all the personnel, weapons and equipment involved in the operation.

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.