With over 326,000 active-duty personnel and more than 55,000 Reservists, keeping track of who’s who—and what privileges and restrictions they might have—is a sizable task for today’s Navy in general and for Sailors in the Personnel Specialist rating (PS) in particular. And the introduction of new programs designed to improve the emotional and financial health and well-being of Sailors has made the importance of correct identification even more important.
But handling all that data has been made considerably since the Department of Defense introduced the Common Access Card (CAC) back in 2000, a digital all-in-one solution for the identification of active-duty uniformed service personnel, eligible contractors, and civilians working in the Department of Defense. The CAC, a “smart card” with a chip encoded with important data, was designed in accordance with the requirements of the Geneva Convention.
In the Navy, two jobs in the Personnel Specialist rating are intimately involved with the issuance, authentication, and tracking of the CACs: Personnel Clerk and Personnel Supervisor. Personnel Clerks are the Sailors who actually issue CACs, and they’re also responsible for explaining how the card’s encryption system works, where and how they can use the card, and what they must do to get a replacement card. Personnel Clerks also flag CACs they discover to be invalid and send that information to a Personnel Supervisor.
Personnel Supervisors are tasked with the operation of the Real-time Automated Personnel Identification System (RAPIDS) that’s used to generate the CACs Personnel Clerks card, and that includes verifying the strict security requirements associated with RAPIDS. The system employs data stored in the Department of Defense Enrollment and Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) and works in tangent with the Joint Personnel Adjudication System, which ensures an applicant for a CAC has passed the appropriate background checks.
There are far more CACs in circulation than there are valid CAC holders because of the issuance of replacements for damaged, stolen, or last cards. Personnel Specialists working as Supervisors forward any invalid CACs they have in inventory to a site security manager, and mail invalid CACs they discover to the Defense Manpower Data Center.
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