MASINT: new eyes in the battlespace

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Jan-March, 2003 by William K. Moore

MASINT will help us view another dimension of the 21st century battlefield. Because of the complex, cluttered nature of that battlefield, we need the ability to see past the obvious and understand the true nature of threats. MASINT will directly improve the knowledge, speed and power of our combat forces on tomorrow's battlefield

Major General John D. Thomas, Jr. (US Army, Retired)

The words "measurement and signatures intelligence" and "MASINT" entered the Army's lexicon in the early 1970s as a means of describing intelligence operations and sources other than the more traditional signals intelligence (SIGINT), human intelligence (HUMINT), and imagery intelligence (IMINT). This "new" source actually represented innovative methods employed to support the oldest and most basic form of intelligence--the process of trying to identify an object or event. One hundred years ago, the "measurement" was often a scout's view of an event occurring in front of his unit. The "signature" identification was the process occurring in his head in which he compared the observed event to his personal "database" or memory of similar events and then identified the activity. Completing this simplistic scenario, he reported the information to a commander or other person who could use it. He detected, processed, identified, and reported. Now and in the future, the Military Intelligence (MI) soldier will take ad vantage of sources that will provide full-spectrum intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to the warfighter. They include--

* Acoustic.

* Magnetic.

* Seismic.

* Nuclear, biological, and chemical.

* Radar.

* Multi-, hyper-, and ultra-spectral.

* Electro-optic (EO).

* Radio energy.

* Olfactory, and other signatures.

MASINT complements the more traditional forms of Army Intelligence by accomplishing the base work of identification, characterization, and location of battlespace entities.

As we move farther into the 21st century, MI faces complexities that will drive our methods and technology in new directions, many of which we can only partially envision today. One of those is the wide availability and dispersion of crucial enabling technologies to every political and military entity in the world. It will become harder to develop intelligence against these forces with traditional methods. MASINT looks at every intelligence indicator with new eyes and makes available new indicators as well. It measures and identifies battlespace entities via multiple means that are difficult to spoof and it provides intelligence that confirms the more traditional sources, but is also robust enough to stand alone. In my opinion, the Army does not treat MASINT as a major intelligence source with the same institutional imperatives as SIGINT, IMINT, and HUMINT. Because of its numerous and widely divergent sources and its long association with the technical intelligence community, it does not receive the visibilit y of its more "mature" cousins. We have not fully engaged MASINT as an operationally valid contributor to the common operational picture (COP) of the battlespace, but these conditions are changing.

Background

In October 1998, the Army assembled a team of functional area experts to design a MASINT concept of operation (CONOP)i chaired jointly by the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca (USAIC&FH), the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (DCSINT), and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The Army charted this integrated concept team (ICT) to develop a CONOP that both defined and forecasted an "operationalized" MASINT with emphasis at echelons corps and below (ECB). The CONOP included a description of requirements, a basic operational architecture, and an analysis of how Army MASINT would support the Army from the years 2005 through 2025. The ICT's goal was to identify future operational capabilities (FOCs), develop an experimentation plan, and assess the impact of MASINT on DTLOMS (doctrine, training, leadership development, organizations, materiel, and soldiers). The result of this effort was a roadmap that the Army would follow to capitalize on recent developments in trainin g and technology in order to complete the ISR infrastructure for the future.

We are not starting from scratch. The U.S. Army has a fairly long history of involvement with nontraditional intelligence development using MASINT. For example, in Vietnam a system known as "Igloo White" was the mainstay remote-detection program that allowed us to conduct our counter-infiltration efforts. It consisted of acoustic, seismic, and magnetic sensors remoted to a central facility for exploitation. Based on that technology, we have today's Improved Remotely Monitored Battlefield Sensor System (I-REMBASS), the soon-to-be-fielded REMBASS II, and the Prophet system that will bring several intelligence domains together into a single package. Similar programs exist throughout our Armed Forces (for example, Steel Rattler and the Platoon Early Warning Device). We have also developed radar-based MASINT intelligence at the tactical level, which for many years employed our AN/PPS-5 and -15 radars. Today, we derive phased- history data (PHD) from synthetic aperture radars (SAR) and moving target indicator (MTI) radars on the Army's Airborne Reconnaissance Low (ARL) aircraft and are major consumers of Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) MTI data. Finally, we are actively investing in hyperspectral MASINT (HSM) technology for future applications that will allow us to examine and identify battlefield entities with new sets of discriminating sensor suites. Simply stated, these are all techniques for comparing collected information to stored templates and signatures to identify battlefield entities.