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RFID: Locked and Loaded for NATO

IGBT

Lifer
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Those episodes of "M*A*S*H" when Radar gets a load of swimsuits in the dead of winter and a half-million tongue depressors instead of medicine were funny, but in real life, it's no joke when the supply chain breaks down and lives are at stake. During the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, the U.S. military found that out the hard way.

"In the Gulf War, the United States wasted $10 billion. They shipped five containers if someone needed one in hopes of finding something. After that, they came back and said, 'Let's address this,'" said Bruce Jacquemard, executive vice president of worldwide sales for Savi Technology, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

U.S. military officials came up with a plan to address the massive supply chain inefficiencies. The U.S. Department of Defense signed a contract with Savi in 1994 to build out and maintain its ITV (In-Transit Visibility) network, now the world's largest RFID (radio-frequency identification) cargo tracking system, stretching across 46 countries and 2,000 locations.
 
RFID is used on all of the shipping containers in ports around the world. There's no better way to track millions of containers.
 
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