RFID For The Department Of Defense: The DoD Mandate
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Like many major retailers, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has issued a mandate to its suppliers that eventually anything sold to them must be marked with an RFID tag. This paper explores the issues surrounding the mandate with attention paid to those things that are unique to the DoD.
Suppliers familiar with the military will be aware that there are standards for everything. The RFID mandate is no different. There are three standards that are particularly relevant, though. They are:
Military Marking for Shipment and Storage
Military Standard 129P; October 29, 2004
Revision P of this standard establishes significant new requirements for DoD
contractors that ship packaged materials to the Government. They must now
provide both linear and two-dimensional (2-D) barcodes on Military Shipping
Labels. Code 391 barcodes will continue to be required on interior packages
and on shipping containers.
The new standard also includes significant material describing the requirements for and usage of RFID tags.
Identification Marking of U.S. Military Property
Military Standard 130L; October 10, 2003
This standard is primarily concerned with the informational content of the
labeling on shipments to the DoD. It includes requirements for labels that are
intended to be read by either or both humans and machines.
MIL-STD-130 does not discuss RFID tag contents directly, but the
requirements for machine readable labeling are written broadly enough to be
useful for that purpose.
EPC™ Tag Data Standards Version 1.1 Rev.1.24
EPCglobal; 01 April 2004
The EPC standard is the authoritative source for how information on an EPC
compliant RFID tag is encoded. All of the various encoding formats are
defined in this specification.