Collecting sufficient and timely environmental information is crucial to Rapid Dominance. Logistics, demographics, and infrastructure are broad areas of collection along with geography, road/rail/ship lanes, utility sites and corridors, manufacturing, government sites, military and paramilitary facilities, population demographics, economic and financial pressure points (such as oil wells or gold mines), and major dams and bridges. Technologies used to provide environmental awareness include traditional means such as satellites that can be augmented with dynamic sensor management tools for optimizing observation routines. The vast quantities of data that reside on the world's computer networks, if properly exploited, provide another rich source of information. Data mining tools, such as Web crawlers, gatherers, brokers, and repositories that pull and organize data from public networks, will be essential to building a more complete picture of potential adversaries. Since not all databases and host computers are cooperative with these methods, offensive information warfare tools will be required to obtain specific pieces of information that are vital for national security purposes. Once data are collected, they must be processed and disseminated and then stored for future access. Enterprise data storage and retrieval systems that are capable of working with many terrabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of information are already commonplace. Since it is impossible for humans to comprehend such vast quantities of information without some assistance, data exploitation tools (filters, fusion, automatic target recognition, image understanding, etc.) will be crucial technologies. Finally, the information, once processed, will be of little use if not disseminated to the right people in a timely fashion. "Intelligent data" dissemination and wide bandwidth communications are examples of essential technologies emerging in this area. In addition to knowledge about regions and locations where U.S. force may be applied, it is important to maintain vigilance and up-to-date knowledge on specific "hot spots" and to have sufficient flexibility within the system to shift attention rapidly to new areas. Systems addressing this more time-sensitive set of tasks would include light, quickly deployable satellites, high altitude and endurance unmanned aerial vehicles, manned platforms, and unattended ground sensors.