  The potential of compressive sensing (CS) has spurred great interest in the
research community and is a fast growing area of research. However, research
translating CS theory into practical hardware and demonstrating clear and
significant benefits with this hardware over current, conventional imaging
techniques has been limited. This article helps researchers to find those niche
applications where the CS approach provides substantial gain over conventional
approaches by articulating lessons learned in finding one such application; sea
skimming missile detection. As a proof of concept, it is demonstrated that a
simplified CS missile detection architecture and algorithm provides comparable
results to the conventional imaging approach but using a smaller FPA. The
primary message is that all of the excitement surrounding CS is necessary and
appropriate for encouraging our creativity but we all must also take off our
"rose colored glasses" and critically judge our ideas, methods and results
relative to conventional imaging approaches.
