Can Nanotechnology Protect Military Equipment in Transit?

news.clearancejobs.com ^ | 8/13/19 | Peter Suciu

[spacejunkie2001]

Last month it was reported that a crew of international con artists allegedly convinced a U.S. defense contractor to ship out millions of dollars worth of sensitive military hardware. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made up a fictitious law enforcement agency website and address and was able to convince the Department of Defense to supply more than a million dollars in military equipment.

These two stories highlight how military equipment is all too often shipped out without any way of it actually being tracked once it leaves the warehouse. In the case of the scammers, who used fake IDs and a phony shipping address, they made off with merchandize worth more than $10.6 million, including $3.2 million in classified gear.

“Shrinkage” – the retail term for stolen merchandize – is actually a common problem in the world of military defense hardware. While sensitive hardware and weapons generally aren’t the items stolen, more common items such as batches of hard drives, memory cards and other computer hardware disappears on routine basis.

The commercial world also deals with the so-called issue of “it fell off the truck,” but in recent years has begun to use RFID (radio-frequency identification), which utilizes an electromagnetic field to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. Unlike with barcodes, these tags do not need to be within the line of sight of a reader, and can be embedded in the tracked object.

RFID could be “downsized” so that it is harder to even know it is there.

[spacejunkie2001]

this is an interesting tracking product as it can protect against theft of products, IP threat, etc. Looks like a co called LocatorX is leading the charge

[jimtorr]

The limitation of RFID being used to track stuff is that it does not transmit on it’s own. The chip must be pinged by a reader. No reader, no tracking.

[Svartalfiar]

Not to mention, rfid readers need to be extremely close to the chips in order to read them.

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*

[SunkenCiv]

International con artists did that? That Christopher Steele has his fingers in *everything*. /s