Issue #147 | May 25, 2008 | by Andy Kowl

As the Memorial Day* holiday is upon us, we repeat a column from a year ago that received one of the biggest reactions we have had on RFID Street. On this weekend, there is no more appropriate message to share. – Editor

As a prime business driver of RFID adoption, writing about mandates of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for a few years now, it is easy to get caught up in the details. What must DoD contractors know or do? What delays have occurred in the department’s implementation? How can you save time and money?

It is worth thinking about the bigger picture now and again. This story has nothing to do with your political point of view and what you think about the United States military involvement in Iraq or elsewhere.

A colonel who had been in Kuwait in 1991 working with supplies, instantly crystallized it for me years ago. Soldiers were in the field ordering supplies they needed. America was quickly mobilized for wartime production and ships were loaded at supply ports in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere, full steam ahead to Kuwait, then unload “on the beach.”

There you are – hundreds of containers staring at you. Thousands. Things need to move quickly. Where are those flak jackets C Company needed? Where are the artillery shells the Marines are screaming for? Men in the field were waiting a reasonable amount of time for there requisitions to arrive, then would order them again. And again. You think finding that out-of-stock at Wal-Mart is pressure? This is as serious as it gets.

History is littered with armies defeated by lack of supply. The movement of supplies is of prime operational impact, with lives at stake. Of course, this is especially true for invading armies or those defending the soil of others. They must bring their stuff with them.

The tracking of those goods for the first Gulf War was done manually. Things were moving fast and distribution centers became overwhelmed, because the systems could not keep up. The Army had to open 28,000 containers, two-thirds of those arriving, “just to find out what was in them,” according to Moving Mountains by William G. Pagonis and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank.

By the numbers, the scope of this is awesome. The U.S. military supply chain moves 42 billion items. That’s 42,000 million. If you count all military assets, including aircraft, ships, bullets and boots, there are 700 billion U.S. military ‘things.’ Just carrying the old platform parts is quite a task, when you remember that the B-52’s in service today are on a 1950’s platform. Other weapons systems have their own long heritage. With all of this, is there any surprise there were more than 2,000 legacy logistics systems?

There are more than 45,000 requisitions every day and an $80 billion inventory. While you’re at it, mix in more than 50,000 vendors. Billions of dollars worth of goods were back-ordered, when I first got these numbers a couple of years ago. At the time, the seven year return on the DoD’s RFID investment was expected to fall between around $100 million to the most optimistic projections of $1.7 billion.

As welcome as they are, dollar savings were not the prime motivator for RFID. This is all about readiness impact. Having billions of assets moving more efficiently impacts the warfighter and saves lives. The expected inventory savings of $3.5 – $7 billion, however, are a nice bonus.

Right now, 100% of the containers shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan are trackable, according to a press briefing at Savi Technologies offices here in the Washington, D.C. metro. “The ‘on its way syndrome’ is now solved,” according to Kevin Donati, “because you can now find everything in transit.”

The Department of Defense has created the In-Transit Visibility (ITV) Network, to which Savi, now a division of Lockheed-Martin, was prime contractor. Soldiers ordering supplies can now see exactly what is coming their way. This RFID-based network has become so essential to the military, it is available to all personnel via AKO, Army Knowledge Online, which I know from my days publishing a military weaponry database, is available ubiquitously to all the services. On your laptop you can see where your shipment is and even tie into Google mapping for true detail.

More critical, in-theater tracking is now universal. Movement Control Teams in forward positions carry handhelds to read and write to the RFID tags, which reads at 200 feet. It is mandatory that the lead and rear vehicle of every convoy carry an active RFID device. Convoys can be redirected, real time, while en route.

One battlefield story, as related by Todd Cavanaugh, offers a telling glimpse of RFID’s human impact on the front lines. As transport convoys were being assembled in Iraq, trucks would line up for their loads to be read. For what often took hours, men and equipment would assemble convoys in range of mortar attack by insurgents, and be exposed long enough for the enemy to plan ambushes. Savi built convoy data collection portals that now reduce assembly time to minutes. Data is now collected as the trucks pass through the portals, on the fly.

Clearly, RFID technology is becoming a foundation upon which the U.S. Department of Defense will rely in war and peace.

* For our readers outside the U.S., Memorial Day commemorates those Americans who have fallen in war to preserve our freedoms.