Presented by Carahsoft
U.S. Transportation Command operates at global scale, coordinating the movement of people and material through a mission that includes planning, ordering, shipping, tracking and payment. Patrick Grimsley, Director of Command, Control, Communications and Cyber Systems for USTRANSCOM (J6), says the command has reached a strategic inflection point in how technology supports that work.
Historically, the department often approached modernization one system at a time. A single USTRANSCOM mission thread, however, can cross 50 or 60 systems. That makes a system-centered view a poor match for the decisions the commander must make. Senior leaders do not need dozens of application-level status reports; they need to understand risk to mission, risk to force and risk to strategy.
USTRANSCOM is therefore shifting toward a data approach. The command is examining the feeds that exist across systems and determining how to convert them into information that supports decisions at the required speed. The technology becomes an enabling layer beneath a mission view rather than the organizing principle presented to the operator.
That shift creates an opportunity—and a requirement—for business process reengineering. Many existing systems were created about 20 years ago. They are monolithic and encode the assumptions and workflows of a different era. Simply replacing their infrastructure may preserve processes that no longer serve the mission.
Grimsley says the command must examine both the systems and the work around them. Which steps remain necessary? Which exist only because a legacy application required them? Which data can move automatically? Modernization creates greater value when it redesigns the process before digitizing it.
Every organization has experienced employees who know their environment almost intuitively—the people who can look at complex network or operational data and immediately recognize what matters. Pairing those experts with leading technologists creates an opportunity to train models that capture repeatable parts of their knowledge. Automation can then extend the reach of scarce experts and free them for harder problems.
Grimsley’s advice to his team is memorable: “Embrace your inner laziness.” The point is not to lower standards. It is to identify work a machine can perform faster and use AI as a force multiplier. Employees still need to understand the tool, apply judgment and remain accountable for the result.
Collaboration should reach beyond traditional contractors. Grimsley highlights the intersection of the commercial sector, education, national laboratories and the military. Events such as DoDIIS help mission owners discover technologies they may not encounter inside their established networks. Staying open to those sources is necessary to lead rather than wait to catch up.
USTRANSCOM measures progress in more than one way. Technology cost savings provide a quantitative measure. Operational time provides another: if a planning process that took eight or nine hours can be reduced to three or four, operators regain time they can apply elsewhere. That translates modernization into mission capacity.
Cyber resilience must be part of the design. Security was once treated as an addition after cost, schedule and performance. Agentic AI and AI-assisted coding make that model increasingly dangerous. New technology should help teams write and test more secure code, while controls are integrated from the beginning.
The destination is a mission environment in which data moves across legacy boundaries, AI amplifies human expertise and commanders receive decision-ready information. For a command responsible for setting the globe and theater, the value is concrete: moving more, moving faster and adapting sooner when global priorities shift.