Two If by Sea

Before Congress got out of town for the holiday, the House Homeland Security Committee approved a sweeping bill intended to stiffen the nation’s border security.

Sweeping measures make me nervous. It normally means that no one had a chance to read all the way through the Bill. I think they only got to the land part, which is rational, I suppose. Most people that come here illegally walk in. They don’t swim.

The emphasis is on hiring new people for the Border Patrol, not high-tech sensors. I had a chance to talk to one of the earnest young Congressmen who worked on the measure two weeks ago. He was interested in things like a “virtual wall,” by which I understood him to mean that there would be no concrete barriers or symbolic razor wire strung across the desert.

He had some legislative ideas of his own, including deputizing the Minutemen vigilantes to help tip off real border security agents. Under his plan, they would be unarmed and have to purchase their own shirts.

But he is a junior member, a first term guy, and he knows already that he has to defer to the Chairman on matters of legislation.

So as it turned out, the 2005 Border Security and Terrorism Prevention Act (House Resolution 4312, if you are keeping count) directs the hiring of 8,000 more Border Patrol agents and 1,000 new inspectors at ports of entry over the next four years.

The other key provision is the end of “catch and release,” which was the old immigration policy. Mexicans apprehended illegally crossing the Border were processed and taken to the nearest crossing point and returned to their home nation directly. Non-Mexican illegals were processed and issued a summons to appear in court. Then they were walked to the front door and released.

Naturally, most just of them just disappeared. The new bill provides for the addition of 32,000 beds to detain the non-Mexican illegal immigrants.

There are also provisions for the improvement of physical infrastructure along some parts of the border, since not everyone is comfortable with the virtual approach. There will also be some high-tech equipment sprinkled in the mix, since the Defense Department is directed to provide the Border Patrol with surveillance assets, including unmanned aerial vehicles.

Last time I looked, the Committee doesn’t have jurisdiction over the Defense Department, so that is actually an issue for another Committee to argue about when the bill is forwarded under the rules of sequential referral to the Judiciary and Armed Services Committee.

The Committee does have the power to direct Secretary Chertoff to come up with a national strategy within a year of enactment to achieve “operational control over all ports of entry into the United States ,” and he is supposed to pay attention to the maritime approaches, too.

That would be useful. Think of all those ships coming this way across the broad oceans, and all those little boats, sturdy and deep-hulled that could carry just about anything nestled down in the darkness.

At the moment, the coastal defenses consist of a few Coast Guard cutters sprinkled at ports on the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Coasts . There used to be artillery posts, but those were closed long ago.

Most of our surveillance assets- radar planes and balloons- are pointed south, looking for drug smugglers. But there used to be a system in place to watch the broad ocean, born in the Cold War, and at least parts of it are still there.

It was optimized to detect the noisy Soviet submarines that brought nuclear-tipped missiles to the sea approaches. But the submarines are much quieter these days, even if there are not some many of them as there once were, and the missiles have much longer legs. They could fire them at us from pier-side, if they desired.

But the urgency of their ardor seems to have cooled, and we stopped worrying about them.

It occurred to me that the acoustic system might be useful to track noisy surface ships, if it still existed, and I trundled over to the Pentagon to talk to someone who might know.

The Building is morphing again. They have been reconstructing it, a wedge at a time, for several years. A building that took eighteen months to build is going to take a decade to re-model. Maybe that is the difference between the generations. They had just finished the heliport side when the airliner crashed in.

There was a flash of urgency, then, and they took the wreckage to the ground and threw up a replacement section in record time. Then they moved on. I was headed over to the basement side, under the Joint Staff spaces. Barriers were going up in the corridors to divide the working spaces from the new construction area, and it was very strange. I could see it the way it was, and see it the way it is all at the same time.

It was very un-nerving. The office I was looking for was a warren of navy cubicles down in the deep sub-basement. Once it had been dark and scary down there, but the area had been one of the first parts to be refurbished, and the corridors now gleam white and featureless. It is easy to get lost down there. New tenants were moving in from parts of the building going under the construction knife.

I had a proposition for the lean Commander that I had the appointment with. I thought there was a way to leverage some of the old Cold War sensors into the new war on terror. My company might be able to help refine the acoustic data from the old sensors, applying improved processing capabilities to make correlations between noise and specific ships.

The Commander looked at me with suspicion, since he correctly perceived me as one of the carrion birds that picks at the Defense Department. I would demur, of course, that I am only seeking the best outcome for all concerned, but who needs to waste breath on that? We are where we sit, after all. He did warm to my proposition, though, since he had been of the same opinion, and had drafted a paper that suggested the same thing.

The Navy had not been pleased with him, since refurbishing the old system would cost scarse dollars for a mission tangential, at best, to the reconstruction of the Fleet. The Admirals commissioned a think-tank to look into the matter, hoping to squash the idea. They were embarrassed to discover that the system in fact was optimized toward tracking merchant ships.

The Commander was vindicated, but he sighed. There is still is no money, and no plan to integrate the sensors to bridge the gulf between the Blue Water approaches to the Continent and the close-in Border Protection mission.

Congress is telling Secretary to come up with something, and I imagine he will.

Maybe he will take a leaf out of history. I think Paul Revere had an idea that worked just fine back in the day, and it was remarkably cost-efficient, leveraging existing legacy equipment.

If the Bad Guys were coming by land, his pals would hang one lantern from the steeple of the Old North Church . If they were coming by boat, they would hang a couple.

One if by land, two if by sea.

I may draft a white paper to that effect. Maybe the Secretary can use it. He has to come up with something.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocora.com

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