"Foremost on any commander's mind," I recall a military historian saying, "was where his men would eat and drink." Equipment for a modern fighting force has certainly expanded and specialized over even the last decades, and the laws of logistics still can and do make or break operations. That makes quite a potential for dangerous confusion. The United States Marine Corps, as always, wants mobility and efficiency. How can it manage that in the growing complexity of weapons and supply technology? By going wireless:
To get their far-from-common job done, the Marines need to do some rather mundane things, like tracking supplies and equipment. Every tank, munition, first-aid kit, and food ration must be accounted for at all times and often in the heat of battle. To do this, the Marines rely on some highly mobile wireless technology. This technology has already been field-tested in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, helping to ensure that troops always have what they need....To track all this equipment, wireless networks and handhelds go out with the troops. Designed to be set up in the field, the tracking system "gives us total asset visibility," [Captain Gary] Clement boasts. "Commanders get a view of exactly what equipment they have on hand. They know what their capability is at all times." With real-time inventory data, commanders always know which missions they can support.
The tracking starts long before equipment arrives on the battlefield. At Marine warehouses, supplies are packed into thousands of containers and pallets. A typical pallet may hold 10 or 15 different items. The Marines use 2-D bar codes—which can hold more than 1,000 bytes of information—to tag each pallet with a wealth of information: what items it contains, what its destination is, what truck it should travel on, and so on.
All of this information can be read instantly by any of some 3,000 Symbol PDT 7240 handheld units the Marines purchased from Symbol Technologies. The handhelds, which run on DOS, Microsoft Windows CE, and, most recently, Microsoft Pocket PC, use built-in radios to communicate with a Symbol Spectrum24 wireless network. During the war in Iraq, such networks were set up at half a dozen Marine base camps, each camp having its own transportation management office (TMO) that receives and ships supplies.
...The system must be set up on the fly, so it also must be easily transportable and simple to use. The network equipment and handhelds are packaged in sealed transit cases that resemble large suitcases. All the necessary settings are programmed in flash memory. "Just break open the box, light it up, and you're ready to go," says Tom Roslak, vice president of homeland security for Symbol Technologies.
Plans for Marines' materiel centralization and vital medical information are on the horizon. Much better than a clipboard, no?