RFID to track military supplies in Iraq

Australian army troops in Iraq will use RFID tags to monitor the movement of equipment from early next year.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) wants to improve monitoring and control of its critical distribution network, which provides items such as rations and weapons to armed forces. In order to improve visibility of supplies in the network, pallets and containers in Iraq would be RFID-tagged from February, Brigadier David McGahey, its director general of material information systems, told ZDNet Australia.

McGahey said: "The tags will primarily store number-plate and identification data."

ADF is also trialling 8MB 'contact memory buttons' with the tags, which can store larger amounts of information, such as how to repair a particular item, McGahey said.

Each tag, supplied by US-based Savi Technology, is battery-powered and can transmit data to readers up to 100m away.

McGahey said: "There are hundreds of millions of items that currently we have poor visibility of", adding that missing or incomplete data has affected army stock records and accounting systems.

However, McGahey revealed there were other drivers for improving the situation.

Terrorists had identified attacking supply chains as a prime way of disrupting opposition forces. "It is a most difficult thing to defend," he said.

"We need the ability to redeploy assets quickly... to be able to change to respond to threats," he added.

The Iraq project accompanies the wider In-Transit Visibility project, which will integrate RFID with ADF's transport, distribution and inventory management systems. This will replace the barcode-based cargo visibility system, which requires manual data input.

ADF will upgrade its enterprise resource planning system in September to incorporate the new RFID distribution network. "We're upgrading our ERP to [Mincom's] Ellipse version," he said.

By August next year, ADF expects to have its Iraq RFID supply chain system replicated in other Middle Eastern countries, as well as its 34 sites in Australia.

The In-Transit Visibility project is due to be completed by May 2007.

Steven Deare writes for ZDNet Australia