Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has planned for various risks to its new technology plan for better securing the nation’s southwest border and so far actual costs are likely to be lower than the $1.5 billion initially thought for the project, the agency’s top acquisition official said yesterday.
Mark Borkowski, assistant commissioner of CBP’s Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition, said a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report focused on the worst potential risks in the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan, which the agency believes is not that risky of an endeavor.
For example, in terms of cost, “while we maybe didn’t measure the risk, we certainly did accommodate it,” Borkowski said before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. Noting that everyone still has to “keep your fingers crossed,” he said that the “actual costs we seem to be incurring are going to be less than what we identified in those rough order magnitude costs because we did accommodate the risk.”
The GAO reported earlier this month that the Arizona border technology plan is at risk, citing a lack of adequate cost estimating and in the documentation for proceeding with the project (Defense Daily, Nov. 7). Using a rough order of magnitude analysis, CBP puts the 10-year, life-cycle cost estimate of the plan at $1.5 billion.
The new technology plan, which was put together as the Department of Homeland Security was deciding whether to cancel its predecessor program, the Secure Border Initiative Network, consists of day/night cameras and radars on fixed towers in remote areas of the border, pole-mounted cameras that would typically be used near urban areas, agent-portable surveillance systems, mobile surveillance systems, handheld equipment and unattended ground sensors.
Plans for technology systems procurement for Arizona are still being put together, with CBP expected in the near-future to issue a draft Request for Proposals for the fixed sensor tower portion of the program, also called the Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT).
Borkowski lauded the GAO report for identifying risks in the Arizona technology plan that CBP has also identified “and frankly believe we’ve managed.”
Borkowski said that the new plan is not a development effort as the various systems that will be used have already been developed. Still, that was largely the case with SBInet, which to a degree suffered from integration challenges of the tower-mounted sensors.
CBP has mapped out its technology plans for the entire southwest border and they are being reviewed by the senior management within DHS, Borkowski said. The process of laying down a technology map for the northern border has just begun, he added.
The technology map for the southern border is based on the replacement plans for SBInet, but those plans will be tested, at least in part, to see whether other types of technology may be a better fit for certain border areas, Borkowski said. For example, he said, in some border areas persistent surveillance infrastructure may make less sense than using intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets such as unmanned aerial vehicles, aerostats, and fixed-wing aircraft.
These ISR assets will enable CBP to “assess whether things are changing, and in response to those changes, adjust our technology plans.”
For the most part, yesterday’s hearing explored whether and how to leverage investments that the Defense Department has already made in the types of technologies that can be used for border security for use in protecting the nation’s borders. Members of the committee basically agreed that this was a good thing, acknowledging though that CBP’s and DoD’s mission needs differ.
Borkowski said one issue with the aerostats, which are used by the United States military for surveillance purposes in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that they have significant operational costs given their need for crews to work with them. CBP has to “be able to absorb the costs to operated and maintain the systems,” he said. Still, he said aerostats are a “promising” technology for border security.
Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.), chairman of the subcommittee, asked if cooperation between DHS and DoD needs to be more formalized for the transfer of defense assets to DHS, particularly in light of the drawdown of United States forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and the fact that there will be surplus equipment and technology that won’t be needed.
Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs, said that nothing structural needs to be done to improve technology and equipment transfer between the two departments, just that the effort needs continued support. Borkowski said that he wouldn’t want the communications channels between his agency and DoD defined more rigidly than now because that could staunch the informal channels he also utilizes for communication with DoD and that he also said are valuable.