The BRITE project was one of the keys to developing my FIST approach to technology development. We had a very small team - in fact, I was the only government guy working on the project (and I was a junior Captain). On the contractor side, we just had a handful of people, and most of them were only assigned to the project part time, as I recall. The budget was quite small, the deployment schedule was short (this was 2001 - 2002). The system was designed to operate in austere conditions and it worked like magic.
That experience had an enormous impact on my thinking and my perspective on what can be done with small teams of talented people, working on tight budgets and tight schedules. It also hammered home the importance of simplicity - organizationally, technically and procedurally.
So, just for fun I googled it and came up with a great story about using BRITE to support the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief effort. It's nice to see that my little project still had legs after I'd moved on to other things.
