By Stephen Larsen

In the largest and swiftest response to a domestic disaster in history, the National Guard deployed more than 50,000 troops to the Gulf States to support relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. However, tracking assets proved to be problematic, at best. Support personnel had no answer to questions like: How much food, water and other supplies were available? Where were those items? And How long would it take to get those items to where they were needed?

“One of the lessons-learned that came out of Hurricane Katrina was that we knew we needed increased capabilities to track assets,” said Maj. Ron Robbins, logistics staff officer with the Army National Guard (ARNG) Readiness Center, Arlington, Va. “We needed tools to track assets when we’re assisting civil authorities in responding to natural disasters and national emergencies, and we needed a tool to share this information across agencies for a common operating picture.”

Such tools that provide in-transit visibility (ITV) are now available from the Product Manager, Joint-Automatic Identification Technology (PM J-AIT), part of the of the Army’s Program Executive Office, Enterprise Information Systems’ (PEO EIS) Project Manager, Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems (PM DCATS).

“Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) products allow logisticians to track shipments from the factory – or fort – to the foxhole,” said Lt. Col. Cary Ferguson, the Product Manager, J-AIT, whose organization has established and maintains a suite of indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts through which DoD organizations can acquire AIT products and support including RFID. “RFID products provide ‘in the box’ visibility – the ability to see the contents of containers or pallets without opening them. These products afford visibility of a unit’s en-route deployment status and facilitate inventory control and redistribution of assets.”

PM J-AIT teamed with the National Guard Bureau (NGB) to conduct a training course at the National Guard Combined Support Maintenance Shop in Manchester, N.J. from Sep. 27 to Sep. 29, 2011, to teach National Guard Soldiers from Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey and New York how to conduct site surveys to deploy radio frequency identification (RFID) systems that provide in-transit visibility.

RFID systems consist of three basic components: RFID tags that are electronically programmed with unique identification information; interrogators that emit and receive radio signals from tags; and computers that process digital information from tags and interrogators. During the training course, Tom Kaberline and Tommy McCullough of the NGB taught the Soldiers how to conduct site surveys and to deploy interrogators, Albert Losten of the NGB taught them how to write to RFID tags and Andy Smith of PM J-AIT showed them how to use the RF-ITV Tracking Portal.