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The Army Wants to Tag Its Equipment with DNA

Try to steal a helicopter now.

You know those streets of Chinatown that are lined with case-carrying men selling fake Rolex watches and talkative women with faux Coach bags? The national defense industry has those, too, but the counterfeit goods are much much more expensive. They’re dangerous, too. These days the most popular item to rip off are the microchips that are used in the guts of fighter jets, helicopters and night vision goggles. But counterfeiters don’t always get everything quite right. Whereas a Rolex that’s missing the “x” on the face looks silly, a defective counterfeit microchip can send a plane full of soldiers into a mountain side.

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Believe it or not, the same tricks that brands use to distinguish the fakes from the real thing are a little bit like what the defense industry is doing to combat counterfeiters. Like the goods themselves, the military’s branding techniques are much more sophisticated than Louis Vuitton’s. Where Louis Vuitton uses gold paint, defense contractors want to use artificial DNA. Applied DNA Sciences and the Defense Logistics Agency are perfecting a technique of marking authentic equipment with plant DNA that will glow when you hit it with a laser. However, each of the tags bears a totally unique DNA sequence that’s practically impossible to reproduce.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the codes used in this DNA technique. Essentially, they just assembled every possible pairing of chromosomes, over a million in all. “We’ve assembled it to break all kinds of natural law,” said Karim Berrada, director of DNA formulations at Applied DNA Sciences. Which gets you thinking. Is it weird that the military is playing around with artificial DNA. What if they started tweaking the DNA of certain animals in order to weaponize them. Elephants with six giant tusks that can run as fast as a horse. That’d be a pretty rad invention actually. They’ll want to trademark that.

Image via Flickr