By Calvin Biesecker
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is conducting market research of mobile tower systems that would be equipped with cameras and possibly radars for a potential follow-on purchase to existing Mobile Surveillance Systems (MSS) for deployments along the country’s northern and southwest borders, according to the director of the agency’s Secure Border Initiative (SBI) program.
The agency released a Request for Information (RFI) in early July for mobile surveillance platforms that are available commercially or through the government. The RFI will allow CBP to do a “kind of cost versus capability trade,” Borkowski said in an interview with Defense Daily this week. “Can I get 90 percent of the capability I’m interested in at 50 percent of the cost?”
Borkowski said he expects there will be more MMS or MMS-like procurements “but that’s going to be advised by this process we’re going through.” The SBI program received $100 million in stimulus funds through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Border Patrol has asked that $15 million be set aside for MSS purchases “or something like them,” he said.
The agency currently owns and operates 44 MSS systems, the bulk of which were acquired from Griffon Corp.‘s [GFF] Telephonics business and some from ICx Technologies [ICXT]. The Border Patrol operates 40 of the MSS systems along the southwest border, and more recently one in the San Diego, sector, two in the Swainton, Vt., sector, and one in the Detroit sector.
The systems operating along the southwest border have been operating for a couple of years but they are not without their problems, which basically have to do with operating in rugged environments. Borkowski said that these “were breaking down too often” with less than 50 percent operating at a time.
“We accepted them with the understanding that we would work with the vendors to get them fixed,” he said. “And most of that is done.”
Boeing [BA], the prime contractor for the SBI program, is under contract with CBP for the maintenance and repair of the MSS systems, which are now up and running between 70 to 75 percent of the time, Borkowski said. “We’d like it to be higher… [but] we’re making progress.”
With the MSS design pretty much stable, the goal now is to get a better understanding of the life-cycle factors associated with operating and maintaining the systems, Borkowski said. That will also help determine how to proceed with future procurements.
‘Now that we’ve got something of a stable design, we’re trying to get some history and experience, how much does it cost to keep them going and what are the types of things in those systems that tend to break most often,” he said. “We don’t have enough experience to have that data so we can’t really do a good projection going forward of whether or not these Mobile Surveillance Systems are going…to be good long-term solutions. We’re in the data collection mode.”
There’s no guarantee that CBP will acquire additional MSS from either Telephonics or ICx.
“We’re being a little bit cautious here because we don’t want to commit too far to the existing systems without a little more confidence in them going forward,” Borkowski said. “And that’s one of the reasons for doing the RFI.”