For up-to-date information on these regulations: www.acq.osd.mil/log/rfid/index.htm

1.0 Introduction

Like many major retailers, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has issued a mandate to its suppliers that eventually anything sold to them must be marked with an RFID tag. This paper explores the issues surrounding the mandate with attention paid to those things that are unique to the DoD.

2.0 Existing DoD Standards

Suppliers familiar with the military will be aware that there are standards for everything. The RFID mandate is no different. There are three standards that are particularly relevant, though. They are:

Military Marking for Shipment and Storage
Military Standard 129P; October 29, 2004

• Revision P of this standard establishes significant new requirements for DoD contractors that ship packaged materials to the Government. They must now provide both linear and two-dimensional (2-D) barcodes on Military Shipping Labels. Code 391 barcodes will continue to be required on interior packages and on shipping containers.
• The new standard also includes significant material describing the requirements for and usage of RFID tags.

Identification Marking of U.S. Military Property
Military Standard 130L; October 10, 2003

• This standard is primarily concerned with the informational content of the labeling on shipments to the DoD. It includes requirements for labels that are intended to be read by either or both humans and machines.
• MIL-STD-130 does not discuss RFID tag contents directly, but the requirements for machine readable labeling are written broadly enough to be useful for that purpose.

EPC™ Tag Data Standards Version 1.1 Rev.1.24
EPCglobal; 01 April 2004

• The EPC standard is the authoritative source for how information on an EPC compliant RFID tag is encoded. All of the various encoding formats are defined in this specification.
• The complete text of these standards can be found by following the links in references 1, 2, and 3, respectively.

2.1 Important Terms

The standard on military markings (MIL-STD 129P) contains five pages listing acronyms followed by seven more pages of definitions. Here are a few of those terms that are particularly relevant to the subject of RFID tagging.

• Palletized Unit Load or Unit Load - Any group of materials that are placed onto a pallet and fastened together so that the pallet can be handled as a single item.
• Individual Shipping Container or Container - A shipping container is defined to be strong enough to be shipped on its own, with no further packaging. Simply placing items onto a pallet together is not the same as placing them in a 'Container'
• Case - A 'Case' can be either an individual shipping container or a container around the outside of a unit load.
• Unit Pack - An individual item identified by a single stock number. This can also be a group of items (like a box of nails).