Biometrics at war: the US military's need for identification and authentication

Biometrics is a serious business for the US military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is five years into a $3.5bn budget, which runs until 2015, for biometric projects. The technology has already been used extensively in conflict zones and for protecting military assets worldwide. And very little of this is biometrics as most of us know it. Military users have specific and often extreme demands and challenges, from difficult environments, through the sheer scale of some of the deployments, through to wanting to use – or create – leading-edge technologies that might just save lives.