By Elizabeth Wasserman

June 1, 2009—For the past 15 years, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has been fighting a war to root out inefficiencies in its supply chain, the largest and most complex in the world. The goal: to make sure troops around the world have the correct arms, medicines, food and clothing when needed, by eliminating waste, improving services and bolstering security. The weapons of choice in this war against inefficiencies: active and passive radio frequency identification technologies.


After the Gulf War in Iraq in the early 1990s, the DOD developed an active RFID-based cargo tracking system—called the RF In-Transit Visibility (RF-ITV) network—to remedy logistics problems; the vast majority of some 40,000 containers shipped overseas had to be opened to determine what was inside, and many held redundant supplies. The RF-ITV now has nodes in more than 40 countries and 4,000 locations, and tracks an average of 35,000 supply shipments per day around the world. In hindsight, the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) estimated that the RF-ITV system would have saved about $2 billion worth of inefficiencies during the Gulf War.

The DOD has pushed for international RFID standards and has been an influence on other governments and organizations. Australia, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and NATO are among the international forces that have been deploying the RF-ITV system over the past few years for real-time visibility of national and multinational shipments.