It's easy to measure success by the number of dollars spent or by the number of programs initiated, without having too much regard for what was bought and how useful it was to the people who need it - the war fighter and the analyst.
But by providing the background picture - the universal situational awareness that we desire - by showing the anomalies, the Space-Based Radar will change the nature of how we do our analysis and our intelligence.
That is really not much different from the search engines that are being constructed today for users throughout the entire world to allow them to search through databases to access the information that they require.
Over the course of two years, we arrived at a point where we began to look at the value added by making information more easily accessible across the intelligence community, both defense and national.
One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.
The users are not going to be in the position of accepting what's been collected; they're going to be in the position of being able to demand collection.
In other words, by finding the anomalous event, what you do is you get out ahead of activities.
Our focus is on outputs rather than inputs.
When you live in a networked environment, it's possible to separate data from applications.
And to do that not only for the war fighter, but also to help prepare the people in the acquisition, personnel and policy worlds who need to make adjustments in the department's business, which itself may take 10 or 15 years to accomplish.
And then fourth, we have that essential group of people who track programs and budgets to ensure that they align with the needs of preparation and warning, counterintelligence and support to the operational war fighter.
So we have a group within the office that is devoted to support for the war fighter. That's, of necessity, an operational and tactical level of concern.
We have been working hard to think about what our combined needs are going to be in the way of intelligence capabilities, not today but 15 to 20 years in the future.
There is a reasonable concern that posting raw data can be misleading for those who are not trained in its use and who do not have the broader perspective within which to place a particular piece of data that is raw.
