Electronic identification tags aid logistics.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

Electronic identification systems are playing an increasing role in national security by speeding military supplies and equipment to U.S. troops on the battlefield, and protecting imported cargo against terrorist attacks, officials said.

The Defense Department began adopting the technology more than a decade ago as part of an effort to improve its logistical system after the first Persian Gulf war. During Operation Desert Storm, the United States shipped 6.5 million tons of equipment to Saudi Arabia.

In the rush to deploy, however, many containers were poorly labeled, with little information about content or destination, said Edward W. Coyle, chief of automatic identification technology for the Defense Logistics Agency, at Fort Belvoir, Va.

"Of the approximately 40,000 containers shipped to Saudi Arabia, about 30,000 had to be opened on the dock to find out what was inside," Coyle told National Defense. To improve their chances of getting supplies, commanders often ordered three times what they actually needed.

The result, he said, were "iron mountains," piles of equipment and supplies containing everything from beans to bullets, which military personnel had to dig through to find what they need to fill specific orders.

Since the Gulf War, the department has deployed a multitude of electronic systems--known collectively as automatic identification technology--to keep better track of cargo as it moves through the supply chain, speed it to where it is needed, and if necessary, even redirect it to a new destination.

AIT, as it is called, includes linear and two-dimensional bar codes, optical memory cards, smart cards, radio-frequency identification tags and satellite tracking systems, Coyle explained.

Military services have used linear bar codes since the early 1980s. These are one-dimensional bar codes, with information carried in only one direction, left to right, and representing a limited group of characters.

In the late 1990s, the Pentagon began using two-dimensional bar codes. Two-D codes which can store data in two directions, left-to-right and top-to-bottom--can handle significantly more information than linear versions.

Bar codes, containing information about contents, destination and point of origin, are assigned to cargo at receiving points. They facilitate the movement and storage of materiel as it moves through the supply chain.

Optical memory cards use technology popularized by audio compact disks and audio-visual CD-ROM (read only memory) products. Data are etched to the card with a high-intensity laser and recovered by a low-power light beam. OMCs contain large amounts of data, and they are relatively inexpensive, reusable, rugged, relatively stable and unaffected by climatic variations. Typically, OMCs accompany large...