While many vendors in the retail sector seem to be scaling back their RFID operations - through an informal poll at the National Retail Federation's Big Show conference in November, everyone I asked said their RFID plans were on the way back burner due to lack of customer interest - the U.S. Department of Defense is increasing its RFID spend for the year with one vendor, Savi, by $60 million

Savi, a Lockheed Martin company, said Monday that its total contract with the DoD now stands at $483 million.

The DoD plans to spend the extra $60 million on the U.S. Army's Information Technology, E-Commerce and Commercial Contracting Center, better known in Army parlance as ITEC4. I put in an e-mail to Savi Monday to get a fuller understanding of what the contract details entail - an expansion of an existing project, or new initiatives - but haven't heard back yet.

This is not Savi's first contract with the DoD. The two have been working together for more than a decade. In that time Savi helped the DoD build its RF In-Transit Visibility network, an RFID-connected supply chain that spans more than 45 countries, tracking military supplies through 4,000 sites using RFID tags and readers. Savi also enables another inter-country supply chain that spans NATO nations and defense forces in the U.K., Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and other countries. I wrote about the NATO network a year or two ago and truly, it's fascinating stuff.

The implications for RFID connectedness - in global defense supply chains, at shipping ports, airports, train stations, trucking lines, you name it - are almost overwhelming to think about in their complexity and, well, interconnectedness. But with contract increases from the likes of DoD, those lines of connection along the world's major supply chains are being put in place as I write this. As I've said before, for supply chain visibility, not at all a bad thing.