1. A directional countermeasures system, comprising: a missile warning subsystem operable to capture lower-resolution images within a wide field of view and to identify a threat within the wide field of view from the captured images, and to provide a subimage contained in a most recent one of these captured images, the subimage containing the threat; a fine tracking subsystem operable to capture higher-resolution images within a narrow field of view and to track and perform countermeasures on a threat identified in the captured higher-resolution images; and a handoff tracker processing subsystem coupled to the missile warning and fine tracking subsystems, the handoff tracker processing subsystem operable to receive the subimage containing the identified threat from the missile warning subsystem and operable to process the subimage to determine features in the subimage and to define the position of these features relative to the position of the threat, and from these determined features being further operable to provide information to the fine tracking subsystem for use in tracking the threat.