Corrosion severely impacts the life cycle cost, operational life, and readiness of Army ground
vehicles. The Army spends an estimated $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year addressing corrosion related
issues with Army ground vehicles. Knowledge of cumulative environmental severity, corrosion
damage, and the state of protective coatings for individual vehicles would enable more effective
prediction of asset life and reduce waste generation from vehicle depainting and repainting. Awareness
of the state of corrosion for a given asset can be achieved through the use of low cost and easy-to-use
corrosivity sensors. Data gained from these sensors would provide a means for the Army to manage
corrosion, reduce vehicle life cycle costs, and improve system readiness. Successful implementation of
a corrosion monitoring system would require that the sensors be low cost, small size and weight, and
widely deployable. Additional requirements include EMI resistance, easy installation, simple operation
and data analysis, and low maintenance. In this paper, we describe a radio frequency (RF) sensor
capable of detecting cumulative environmental severity. Several critical design parameters are
addressed. Finally, the mechanism responsible for the sensor operation is briefly considered.