May I see a show of hands…..how many served in the US military?
The topic is “dog tags”…..that piece of metal around a soldiers neck that has all his pertinent information imprinted on them…..in Vietnam they were in the lace of your boots……it seems that the military has decided it was time for a change……after I read this article my first thought was…..well duh!
For soldiers, a dog tag “individualizes the human being who wears it, despite his or her role as a small part of a huge and faceless organization,” CNN quotes the Library of Congress as saying. But few citizens probably realize the danger dogs tags can put soldiers in. “If you find a pair of lost ID tags you can pretty much do anything with that person’s identity because you now have their blood type, their religion, you have their social, and you have their name,” says Michael Klemowski of the US Army Human Resources Command in an Army press release. “The only thing missing is their birth date, and you can usually get that by Googling a person.” And so in a bid to combat such potential ID theft, the Army announced Tuesday it’s making changes to dog tags for the first time in four decades, the Army Times reports.
CNN reports the Army will be removing each soldier’s Social Security numbers from his or her dog tags and replacing it with a 10-digit, randomly generated Defense Department ID number. SSN-less dog tags were actually called for in 2007, but implementation has been a long time coming due to the number of Army systems that use Social Security numbers, the Army Times reports. Each of those systems had to be reprogrammed to work with the new 10-digit ID number. As for the rollout of the new tags, “This change is not something where Soldiers need to run out and get new tags made,” says Klemowski. “If a Soldier is going to deploy, they are the first ones that need to have the new ID tags.”
Gee….when I wore them you had your service number imprinted on them…..in those days it was an 8-digit number and it told others if you were regular army, reservist or a draftee…..so I guess we are going back to the “old days”……yet again.
Here is to dog tags…sad terminology….
https://youtu.be/5fbvquHSPJU via @YouTube
https://youtu.be/p1OZjvBrJgs via @YouTube
A peaceful Sunday to you …….
Thanx and the same for you my friend….chuq
Yes: Air Force was AF00000000. Army was either: RA00000000 or US00000000. I remember it well. It worked out fine. Can’t imagine why all the switching around especially when the SSN was never … never … never meant to be used as individual ID.
Prefix NG for national guard and ER for reservists….I still remember mine…..I think they were looking for simple instead they got what normally happens….messed up.
Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long once remarked that, when any country becomes so anal (corrupted) it requires its citizens to carry ID of any kind, that country is lost; it is on the path to degeneracy, and it is time to leave to find a place where one can still be themselves, without any numbers attached as an ID….
Time to head for the hills, ffolkes…. In point of fact, it is long past time…. this nation, as are every other one in the world, is lost to corruption, and the degeneracy of being Governed….
Too bad the only hill left leads into Space….
gigoid, the dubious
Yep….we are so screwed…..chuq
Now that I think of it….what better (low tech) way to steal an identity than a dog tag from a soldier’s body who is MIA? It’s kind of like taking names from tombstones who are the same age as you, only with FAR more ID backup.
How could this have taken so long to stop? I’m sure there’s a lot of Black Ops-ers etc who use it to create “Legends” for unsanctioned activities.