Tagging for more efficient warfare

In the unsavoury business of war, getting supplies to the right place at the right time is a pivotal concern.

Transporting bullets, boots and butter to soldiers during the 1990-91 Gulf War, for example, turned out to be rather more difficult than US strategists had anticipated. The hi-tech US army was given cause to reflect on the simple logistical shortcomings that had hamstrung military operations in the Gulf.

Supply chain inefficiencies during that war reportedly created losses of around $2 billion. "During the early 1990s, they [the US] had ‘Iron Mountains’ of containers in the desert," explains Mark Nelson, director of corporate communications at Savi Technology, a Lockheed Martin company. "They would order containers of supplies just in case soldiers didn’t have what they needed. They called it ‘just in case’ logistics. They had a lot of excess inventory."

Faced with ‘Iron Mountains’ comprising some 45,000 containers, military staff expended considerable amounts of time and energy sifting through products to find what they needed. The US Department of Defense’s haphazard supply strategy was clearly not working. With no reliable means of tracking equipment, US strategists were unable to plan effectively.

Radio frequency identification (RFID), an automatic detection method used to retrieve data from small devices attached to products, people or animals, was pinpointed by experts as a possible answer. Savi, the leading player in the market for RFID defence applications, was instrumental in applying the technology to the subsequent development of the world’s largest cargo tracking system. Using so-called tag technology, the US army is now able to track products in 2,000 locations in more than 40 countries.

"After the war, the military looked at ways of improving the visibility of shipments. They found that RFID was promising in its application," says Nelson. "A general said that the system reduced the amount of time it took to find supplies from between two and four days to several minutes."

The backbone of any cargo tracking system consists of a series of RFID reader tags fitted with antennae that are dotted in a number of locations. Tagged equipment passing through any given location is able to receive the reader’s activation signal. The reader decodes the data encoded in the tags and data is sent over the wired communication networks to the relevant database.

Other organisations were quick to follow suit. NATO contracted Savi in 2004 to manage and track multinational consignments between Europe and Afghanistan. The network stretches from the Netherlands and Germany through Uzbekistan to Kabul in Afghanistan. Savi went on to develop the system further so that national forces would also be able to plug into the network. ‘In-transit visibility networks’ have also been built for the governments of the UK and Denmark.

While RFID is also being developed in the commercial world (by supermarket chains such as Wal-Mart in the US, Tesco in the UK and Metro in Germany), it has proven to be especially useful in the military context. "The military has a very complex delivery chain," says Andrew Barker, business development director at Wavetrend, a UK-based RFID company. Wavetrend has been in discussions on the technology with the UK Ministry of Defence and has created an RFID network for the UK Royal Air Force (RAF).

Wavetrend technology can track consignments at a pace of 50 tags a second. In an organisation such as the RAF, where equipment is shared between squadrons, tracking arrivals and departures to log the location of material at any given time makes all the difference. "A mechanic can spend 70% of his time looking for equipment he needs to do his job," says Barker. "If he could cut this to, say, 40%, you have immense efficiency savings."

For many market players, securing interoperability of systems is a priority. "A lot of work needs to be done so there’s not a monopoly on standards," says Barker. "Existing standards need a lot of refinement. They are based on bespoke systems which isn’t necessarily the best thing to get an inter-operable system. Open architecture that anyone can plug into will drive prices down to create better value for money."

In the unsavoury business of war, getting supplies to the right place at the right time is a pivotal concern.