In an announcement yesterday, the Dulles, Va.-based vendor said the rollout is already under way, with all systems to be deployed and in operation by the end of this year.

"The secretary of State has required by contract for suppliers to provide anything at the case or pallet level with an RFID tag because it's a significant increase in efficiency for the supplier and the Department of Defense," said Patrick J. Sweeney II, CEO of ODIN. "It should significantly reduce the cost of the entire war effort" by keeping better track of supplies en route and cutting storage and transport costs.

ODIN was selected from among 11 vendors for the project, which will use passive RFID tags to track goods being transported by the Defense Department. The tags used by ODIN include a chip and a tiny antenna embedded in a label that looks like a bar-code label, Sweeney said. The label also include text that is readable.

Tag readers -- each about the size of a laptop computer and equipped with four antennas -- are placed on either side of a loading dock door to scan the RFID tags for data. The labels are read and the items tracked as they pass through the readers when being loaded and unloaded.

"The big benefit is that you can read many of these at the same time and you don't have to have line o--sight [access to each container], which is necessary for bar codes," Sweeney said.