perfidy

The ubiquitous "dogtag" is getting a makeover.

Matter of fact, several thousand improved identity tags are already downrange. The new tags are more than just a visual display of name, ssn, blood type, and religious preference stamped on a flimsy splinter of aluminum. Oh no. These babies will be all electronical and whatnot, and record every med you're taking, all your allergies, all your ow-ies, every injury and sickness you were ever treated for, and could probably archive every time you beat off too, 'cept that where soldiers are concerned no device yet conceived has the memory capacity to store that much data.

But the real clever bit is that field medics will have electronic readers, somewhere between PDAs and medical tricorders, that can read the data on e-tags just by proximity. Medics will not have to dig around a wounded servicemember to plug the new tags into their reader, and gone will be the days where that medic or corpsman had to find the old tags before he could see bloodtype or that he's allergic to such-such med. Taking it a step further, those med readers will tie into your permanent health records, maintained at your post or base of origin, the hospital where you were (or are about to be) treated, or presumably your civilian health system or the VA after you get out.

I think there's alot that can be weird and kludgy with such a system, particularly with all the vagaries of wireless data transmission that have to occur without fail. I might also be unsure about power use/supply/resupply to those readers, particularly with forward units or SOF far away from reliable energy supply or logistics trains.

But I'm not skeptical of the overall program concept, and I think it's a tremendous advantage.