Army to lose dog tags in favor of computerized 'smart card'

SAN ANTONIO - That old silver metal dog tag, a staple of American military life for generations, soon may find its place in museums alongside muskets, cannon balls and C rations.

The Army will soon seek bids for developing a "smart" dog tag that uses a computer chip to provide critical medical information to doctors in the field. It will be tested at an Army post next year and distributed to the nation's 1.4 million active-duty troops within two years.

"I think it's a continuation of the Army's interest in digitizing the battlefield ' Fort Sam Houston spokesman Phil Reidinger said. "As the Army gets smaller and the equipment gets smarter and the soldiers get smarter, then we can do more with less."

The 10-megabyte Personal Information Carrier would be a quantum leap over the nearly century-old dog tags now used throughout America's military. At least one high-tech expert says the new tags, or PICs, also are one of the most ambitious applications yet of "smart cards," credit-cardlike devices with a dime-size silicon microprocessor.

Capable of storing text, sound and images containing vital medical information the new dog tag would be linked to personal computers that would display the data to physicians at bases and in mobile field hospitals. A prototype 10megabyte computer chip was tested last year.

man for the Air Force surgeon general's office. The most expensive part of the PIC system, she said, will be the personal computers that download information from the dog tags.

The surgeon general's office says information from the tags will be fed into databases to ensure its survival even if PICs are lost or damaged. The PIC would contain a soldier's complete medical record, including immunizations digitized X-rays and possibly even echocardiograms, which provide a videotaped image of the heart, Mr. Reidinger said.

It also could contain a soldier's DNA history and military record he added.

"The potential is enormous, and it depends on what the commander sees as his or her need to deploy those soldiers 'Mr. Reidinger said.

Today's dog tag essentially is the same as the disc-shaped IDs used almost a century ago. It contains a name, religious preference, blood type and Social Security number. Now used throughout the services, the first dog tags were introduced to the Army in 1906, more than four decades after a New Yorker proposed a metal ID disc to be worn by officers and enlisted men during the Civil War.

With the Army rejecting John Kennedy's dog tag idea in 1862, Union troops were forced to pin slips of paper with their name and home address on the backs of their coats or stencil identification on their knapsacks. Letters from home, diaries and notebooks also were used to identify fallen soldiers.