Military Standard 130 Overview

Military Standard 130 (MIL-STD-130) is one of many standards that the U.S. Government has developed to guide individuals and companies within the DoD and outside the DoD on uniform engineering and technical requirements for military-unique or substantially modified commercial processes, procedures, practices, and methods.

MIL-STD-130 is specifically used to communicate standard practices for identification marking of U.S. Military Property. While many typically reference MIL-STD-130 as the “UID” standard, it is actually much broader than that. MIL-STD-130 provides an “evolving clarification, increased insight and guidance regarding implementation of Machine-Readable Information (MRI) for item identification marking and automatic data capture.” Since the data matrix code required by the UID program is a machine readable code it is covered by MIL-STD-130 as is many other details about the structure of the IUID (Item Unique identifier). MIL-STD-130 N Change 1 is the latest version of the standard, published on November 16, 2012.

It can be helpful to read the 130N standard but this standard, like most, is supported by user handbooks that more specifically explain the application in real terms. For instance, MIL-STD-130 is supported by several documents like: Guidelines for Engineering, Manufacturing and Maintenance Documentation Requirements for UID Implementation Version 1.2 (April 20, 2007), Item Unique Identification of Government Property Guidebook (September 21, 2007), DoD Guide to Uniquely Identifying Items, Version 2.5 (PDF) (September 15, 2012), DoD Instruction: Item Unique Identification (IUID) Standards for Tangible Personal Property 8320.0 (PDF) (September 3, 2015), and others.

The other resource for implementation of MIL-STD-130 is Camcode. Since we specialize in making compliant UID labels, we have studied the standard and associated documents to know what is applicable to your specific case.