Defense Transportation Reporting and Control System

DTRACS was a tracking and control system used by United States military units in Europe and South West Asia (SWA). The system is actually a commercial product from Qualcomm. Its commercial name is OmniTRACS and is in use by commercial trucking fleets throughout the world. Initially, when the system was first in use by the US Army in Europe (USAREUR), it was run through an Alcatel contract out of Paris with a data feed to the USAREUR G4 Logistics Automation Division (LAD).

After it became more heavily used, it was determined that the Army needed its own secure hub on a military base in Germany. This hub was located in Mannheim, Germany outside of Coleman Barracks at a location known as the "tank-farm". This location was chosen because it already housed other satellite hubs, one of which was for AFN.

While the Land Earth Station (LES) was located in Mannheim, the network servers that processed the messages and GPS location information were initially housed in Friedrichsfeld, Germany. They were later moved to Kilbourne Kasserne in Schwetzingen. This move was made because the facility at Friedrichsfeld was not robust enough and had poor communications paths. The site in Schwetzingen, also known as "Site-S" had better comms and was also an official military Network Operations Center (NOC).

At its height, there were three server stacks for processing DTRACS data. One stack for European devices, another for devices in SWA and a third for receiving a split-feed from the KBR (Kellog Brown and Root) owned and operated server. While KBR had their own vehicles and server, all three systems used the satellite for their communications

The system was replaced by a newer system called Movement Tracking System, or MTS. The last use of DTRACS by the US military was in early 2007. While some devices were still used by KBR in their deployment, the military decided to go with MTS instead of DTRACS for its logistics tracking solution.

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