Work on U.S.-Mexico 'Virtual Fence' Frozen

Defense News

It took 4½ years and $833 million for Boeing and the Department of Homeland Security to erect 28 miles of "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexican border.

At that rate, it will take 320 years to finish the job, said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas.

Or it may never get built, now that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a spending freeze on the fence, formally known as the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBInet. Napolitano said the fence project, which is intended to stop drug smugglers and illegal immigrants from entering the United States, is too "plagued with cost overruns and missed deadlines" to continue without a through reassessment.

Meanwhile, $50 million that was to be spent on the fence will instead be spent on other technology to help secure the southern border, Napolitano said.

Boeing was hired in 2006 to install thousands of video and infrared cameras, radars and ground sensors to provide constant surveillance along the U.S.-Mexican border. Computers and software were to combine the intelligence collected by the cameras and sensors to produce a real time picture, day and night, of smugglers and migrants to Border Patrol agents whose job is to intercept them.

And it works - some of the time and in a few locations.

"We are seeing real-world results in actual Border Patrol operations in the Tucson sector," Roger Krone insisted during a March 18 hearing before two House Homeland Security subcommittees. Krone is president of Boeing's network and space systems division.

The subcommittees saw video that appeared to be shot by an infrared camera and was said to show Border Patrol agents intercepting "six backpackers" last month as they carried 200 pounds of marijuana into the United States near Tucson, Ariz.

But success in Tucson doesn't help in Texas, which Rep. Michael McCaul said "has nothing on its border" while "a lot of killings are taking place" on the Mexican side.

"There is a war going on there," McCaul said. The seriousness of the situation was illustrated March 13 by the gang-style slayings of a U.S. consulate worker, her husband and the husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate in Cuidad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas.

Last year, more than 6,000 Mexicans were murdered in violence that is largely fueled by illegal trade.

"It's going to spill over into this country," said McCaul, a Republican whose district stretches east from Austin more than 200 miles from the Mexican border. "We can't afford a time-out" to re-evaluate SBInet, he said.

But others on subcommittees said SBInet is too flawed to continue.

Rep. Chris Carney, D-Pa., said that with so little to show for more than $800 million spent, "does it make sense to keep spending" on SBInet? "Do we get a refund?"

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said that despite the time and money spent on SBInet, "we are still without an effective technological tool to secure our borders."

While much of the blame is assigned to Boeing, the contractor, a good deal is also assigned to DHS for inadequate project management.

The Government Accountability Office, which has reviewed SBInet four times, said part of the problem is that key parts of the project "were ambiguous and in a continuous state of flux, making it unclear and uncertain what technology capabilities were to be delivered when."

The program lacked a master schedule, important milestones were allowed to slip and requirements were poorly defined, GAO said.

DHS allowed untested components to be installed and deployed, and the agency's failure to adequately manage testing "increased the risk that the system will not perform as expected and will take longer and cost more than necessary," GAO said.

Testing was so poorly managed that 70 percent of the tests to check SBInet performance were rewritten as they were being given, said Randolph Hite, head of GAO's information technology architecture and systems issues branch.

In some instances, tests were rewritten because the original tests were insufficient or inaccurate. But in other instances, tests were rewritten to ensure that components passed, he said.

Even then, tests turned up 1,333 SBInet defects between March 2008 and July 2009. Finding defects isn't necessarily bad. "The purpose of testing is to find problems," Hite said. "It is a given that you will find problems."

But with SBInet, testing uncovered problems at a faster rate than Boeing could correct them. "Such an upward trend is indicative of an immature system and can indicate a failure to meet system specifications," Hite wrote in a report.

Krone said the discovery of problems was expected. "In many cases, we push the system to failure to understand its detailed functionality and durability."

With SBInet floundering and DHS looking for new border technology, McCaul and other lawmakers say it's time to turn to military technology, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles.

Cuellar said he is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to get DHS permission to fly UAVs along the U.S.-Mexican border. Carney said that at $8 million apiece, DHS could buy several Predator UAVs and still have money from Napolitano's $50 million to spend on other technology.