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.

"We don't want to develop something from the ground up. I hope this works," Rep. Candice S. Miller, R-Mich., chairwoman of the House Homeland Security Committee's border security panel, said in an interview with Nextgov.

A final request for proposals is scheduled for release on March 7. Officials have pledged to ditch the project if vendors lack suitable products currently operational, rather than proceed with risky, new engineering. Equipment developed for the now-defunct Secure Border Initiative network, or SBInet, malfunctioned in the desert climate.

"I'm very interested in working with the department in every way that we can -- to hopefully be a creative thinker and assist in areas where we can help," Miller said. "I think this is a historic moment in time in terms of the drawdown" of Defense Department troops and equipment.

At a Feb. 15 full committee hearing, Miller urged DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to examine off-the-shelf hardware such as drones back from Iraq and Afghanistan that DHS can get "on the cheap."

Napolitano said, "we're constantly interchanging with DoD to see if there are technologies that we've already paid to have developed that we can use in our civilian missions. That's an ongoing process."

This week, Miller welcomed the secretary's apparent receptiveness.

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.

At a hearing Miller chaired last fall, DHS officials expressed interest in fielding surplus military systems and said Pentagon research already is guiding the department's acquisition of sensors for the project. They cautioned, however, that some promising vehicles, such as blimp-like aerostats, require extra funding for training civilian crews and adapting technology to DHS' command-and-control environment.

"One of things that Congress needs to step up on is focusing attention on the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to really coordinate on various things," Miller said in the interview.

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.

GAO officials this week said they have not yet reviewed February's solicitation but they expect to start doing so in the next several months.

Ray Bjorklund, chief knowledge officer at market research firm Deltek, said DHS does not always see the bigger picture: "Oh, you mean we have to sustain this system once we get it out there?" he said of their planning. "If they were to truly embrace all the concepts that DoD uses, it may cost a little more to dot all the i's and cross all the t's -- and it will keep GAO off their backs."

Currently, funding appears on track for the initial acquisition, Bjorklund said. He pegged the contract value at about $350 million, if all options are exercised. Congress recently dispensed $400 million to fund border security, fencing, infrastructure and technology for the rest of the fiscal year. The White House has asked for $327 million in its 2013 budget request.