In today’s modern defence industry the tendency is to not reinvent the wheel by using proprietary standards, but to incorporate the use of civil standards to promote commercial best practices. Global Solutions offered by GS1 play a role in the defence sector including but not limited to procurement, logistics and asset tracking.

GS1 standards are endorsed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). We have established formal working agreements involving codification and asset tracking. GS1 continues the work with NATO since the formal proposal to examine the linking of the NATO Stock Numbers (NSN) and the GS1 system was reviewed by NATO officials in 1997.

The use of the GS1 system is promoted in a variety of NATO Standardization Agreements (STANAGs), which are the foundation for NATO countries with a uniform/common system for the identification, classification, and stock numbering of items of supply. NATO recognizes the benefits of GS1 in areas including but not limited asset / consignment tracking, standard bar code symbologies, e-commerce and RFID.

Embracing GS1 Standards contributes to NATO to achieve the following benefits:

• Interoperability and compatibility
• Decrease in Duplication of Efforts
• Use of civil standards

• Control of Procurement Costs  

 NATO Standardization Agency (NSA) and GS1 signed technical cooperation agreement: On 31January 2006, the director of the NATO Standardisation Agency (NSA), Brig. Gen. Julian Maj, and the Predident and CEO of GS1, Miguel A. Lopera signed a technical cooperation agreement (TCA) between their organisations at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

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