High Priority

James Clapper, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, wants everything in the field of measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to be considered a top priority.

"MASINT operations and activities shall be treated as high-priority efforts and receive full and proactive support in all resourcing and programmatic actions," he wrote in an April 22 Defense Department instruction.

The previous version of the document, which dates from 1993, contains no such language.

According to Clapper's instruction, MASINT is defined as:

Information produced by quantitative and qualitative analysis of physical attributes of targets and events to characterize, locate, and identify them. MASINT exploits a variety of phenomenologies to support signature development and analysis, to perform technical analysis, and to detect, characterize, locate, and identify targets and events. MASINT is derived from specialized, technically-derived measurements of physical phenomenon intrinsic to an object or event and it includes the use of quantitative signatures to interpret the data.

The high-priority designation for MASINT comes amid a growing interest from defense leaders in anything capable of providing improved intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data.

The Pentagon's ISR requests have soared since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Operations there have shown a critical need for information about violent extremists' operations -- a markedly different intelligence challenge from the Cold War era, when U.S. spy satellites were often tasked to simply photograph large Soviet formations.

In today's security environment, a few potential MASINT applications come to mind: Separating friends from foes in urban warfare, identifying buried targets, or finding improvised explosive devices.

On the latter issue, Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization chief Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz last year said his office is working on ways to make the characteristic copper plates of armor-piercing roadside bombs, or explosively formed penetrators, visible to nearby ground forces through the use of radar and other sensors.