This article was originally published by RFID Update.
February 10, 2005—Attendees to a U.S. Department of Defense summit being held this week in Washington, D.C., got an update on the department’s RFID initiative: the DOD is ready to accept RFID-tagged shipments, and indeed two depots are already doing so. Even more impressive, the director of logistics for the Defense Logistics Agency reported that a full 97% of pallets bound for Iraq are shipped with RFID tags.
The DOD’s RFID mandate is second only to Wal-Mart’s in terms of its impact on RFID adoption. It has stalled in the last few months, however, as certain required bureaucratic procedures were found lacking. According to Line56.com, the Office of Management and Budget, which controls much of the federal budget, needed to create new regulations for contracts involving RFID. Those regulations should be in place by spring, when the DOD RFID initiative will ramp back up. So DOD suppliers take heed: what has heretofore been fairly lenient will quickly become more demanding around the middle of this year.
