Tag: NSN | NATO | National Stock Number

National Stock Number (NSN) is the US form of NATO Stock Number which is a numeric code of 13 digits that is used to identify all of the ‘standardized material items of supply’ that are recognized by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies along with United States Department of Defense on the basis of the NATO Standardization Agreements. But many non NATO Countries also use National Stock Numbers such as Japan, New Zealand and Australia. Sometimes a two-digit suffix is added to the National Stock Number for denoting the asset though it is not considered a part of NSN.

The National Identification Number is a combination of a four-digit FSCG (Federal Supply Classification Group) code which relates the particular item to the FSG (Federal Supply Group) and FSC (Federal Supply Classification) of similar types of items and a nine-digit National Item Identification Number (NIIN) which has the function of identifying the items uniquely. The first two digits of the NIIN provide the NATO country code also known as NCB code. Different countries have different NCB code. For instance the NCB code for USA is 00 or 01 while the NCB code for United Kingdom is 99. The last seven digits of the NIIN denote the unique serial number of the items which does not follow any particular pattern. So the format of a National Stock Number is: 1234-56-789-1234.