The Defense Department organization dedicated to helping service members, civilian employees and their families navigate permanent change of station moves could become a permanent agency as soon as this year.
“The joint organization is now in the process of transitioning towards an agency. I can’t make promises, but I think probably sometime this year we will officially be an agency. Think the [Defense Logistics Agency], think the [Defense Information Systems Agency],” Army Maj. Gen. Lance Curtis, the organization’s first commander, said Tuesday during at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington.
“We are all in, we have skin in the game. We know things have not been right,” he added.
Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood up a PCS task force — managed jointly by the under secretary for acquisition and sustainment and the under secretary for personnel and readiness — with Curtis at the helm. The task force, Hegseth said at the time, would assess the problems with household goods shipments and other aspects of PCS moves.
The Pentagon later turned the task force into a permanent joint activity. Hegseth said the organization’s mission was to guarantee “high-quality, reliable and efficient household goods and vehicle shipment services to the more than 300,000 warfighters worldwide, who move somewhere every new year.” The activity reports directly to Hegseth.
Even before becoming a permanent organization, the task force began overhauling how the department manages PCS moves. Last August, for instance, the task force set up a joint operations center, along with a call center, providing the department with its first common operating picture of the global movement of service members and their household goods.
“We couldn’t tell what was going on around all of our different shipping locations, and we realized we had to solve that,” Curtis said. “We determined that in order to take care of our service members and their families, we needed a call center that was joint representation from all the services that could answer problems.”
The call center, staffed by active-duty troops, offers around-the-clock global support, serving as a single point of contact for service members and their families throughout their entire moving process.
“They are not going to stop the help process until you, the service member or the family, say the problem has been solved,” Curtis said. “We can solve almost any challenge on the spot from start to finish.”
In addition, the activity plans to replace the department’s existing Defense Personal Property System, which allows service members and their families to schedule and track their shipments, with a platform called MilMove. Curtis said the transition to MilMove is expected to take approximately two years.
The department will roll out new features in phases — by the 2027 peak moving season, which runs from May 15 to Sept. 15, service members should be able to arrange the shipment of their privately owned vehicles on their phones. The following year, the department expects service members to be able to book all household goods shipments and file claims for lost or damaged property
through the platform.
Additional changes to PCS moves
For the first time, service members can start booking their household goods shipments 48 days earlier — as long as they have their PCS orders in hand.
“Service members, spouses and families tell us that they like that for obvious reasons. Industry also likes that. It gives them predictability and it allows them to build capacity much earlier than they could,” Curtis said.
In addition, the PCS property claim filing window has been extended from nine to 12 months.
“What we have done now is you can file an inconvenience claim for all of the members who are actually on your orders. Now, what I would encourage you to do, though, throughout that process, is to make sure that all of your defendants are actually listed on your orders, so that we can do that. But now they also are entitled to compensation for that,” Curtis said.
The PCS organization also launched a new website to streamline the military moving process.
The website provides step-by-step moving guidance and checklists for every stage of the relocation process, information on permanent change of station moves and resources for filing claims and shipping privately owned vehicles. The platform also features a centralized library of printable tools and guides.
“There were lots of different websites that were out there. Now we have one authoritative website,” Curtis said.
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