Pentagon-inspired border plan elicits congressional support

Congressional overseers say they support a new strategy to monitor the Southwest border with military-grade aircraft and other existing surveillance tools as a substitute for a botched $1 billion virtual fence. Some Republicans also praise the Homeland Security Department for considering the deployment of Pentagon drones no longer being used in overseas wars. DHS officials on Feb. 16 issued a revised solicitation for the first round of new border technology that centers on defense or industrial "predeveloped" machinery that has been through the production line. The 10-year, $1.5 billion project is intended to keep drug smugglers, terrorists, illegal immigrants and other suspicious individuals from entering the United States. Some DHS-owned drones -- unmanned, remotely piloted aircraft -- currently survey Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Corpus Christi, Texas; and several other border areas. Military helicopters and airplanes returning from overseas this year will replace many National Guardsmen along the Southwest border, DHS officials recently announced. But drones are not part of that fleet. Miller said demilitarized unmanned aircraft, robots and land vehicles all should help guard the U.S.-Mexico border. Before this month, the department's previous technology solicitations aimed to prop up a series of interconnected towers, wide-area cameras, ground radars and data feeds that could share information. Now officials have simplified their ambitions. They aren't interested in networking everything just yet. They've decided they don't need the radars. And cameras need only detect walking humans from up to five miles away, not seven and a half miles away, as previously required. They want, at most, six stand-alone towers suited to the terrain and weather of each surveillance point. The more sophisticated features can be added over time, officials said.

Sounds good right?  Well, just keep on reading:

While lawmakers this week seemed satisfied with the new technical approach, some noted that Homeland Security still may be biting off more than it can chew. DHS, an amalgam of 22 agencies joined a decade ago, struggles to supervise large contracts, according to numerous studies by the Government Accountability Office. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an email that "the department's new emphasis on deploying proven technologies to the border is appropriate." But, he added, "I am concerned by a recent GAO report that found the current technology deployment plan doesn't incorporate performance metrics and that DHS has not documented its justifications for deploying different kinds of technologies to different parts of the border. The last thing we need is a repeat of some of the mistakes that resulted in the cancellation of SBInet." GAO auditors in the fall derided DHS officials for neglecting to articulate a rationale for each step of the strategy and for failing to calculate a cost range should unforeseen events occur, such as schedule slips. The new SBInet offshoot comes on the heels of the U.S. Coast Guard's failed modernization project called Deepwater, which went $5 billion over budget, and a computerized immigration casework system that, after exhausting $700 million and more than five years of labor, still has not materialized...more

So what do you do with a federal agency that has wasted $7 billion dollars?  Why you give them $1.5 billion more to waste.  Instead of more money they need to bust up DHS and do it quickly.