One of the first rules you learn when working for the US military is, if your kick doesn't go between the goalposts... find a way to move the goalposts. Every

One of the first rules you learn when working for the US military is, if your kick doesn't go between the goalposts... find a way to move the goalposts. Every military contract/mission officer wants one thing: to claim success for their project at the end of the year. They quickly learn the best way to do this is to reshape the metrics for success so that, whatever the outcome was for that year, you can claim that was the real objective all along. In the space of R&D contracting, it turns out that "blind the generals with flashy demos" does that rather well. Of course, that also requires that the original mission objective be phrased in ambiguous terms so "goalpost" and "kick" remain freely fungible concepts. To that end, in 1964, "Defeating Communism" fit the bill nicely. Today it's "Defeating Terrorism".