By Calvin Biesecker
Ongoing issues with different systems and components of the Secure Border Initiative’s virtual fence project, dubbed SBInet, is leading to further delays in the program that, in turn, have led the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to undertake a formal review of program options that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had been mulling less formally, CBP’s lead official on SBI said yesterday.
The formal review was directed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and is being structured and designed now, Mark Borkowski, CBP’s director for the SBI program, told Defense Daily.
That review is likely to look at a range of issues and outcomes, Borkowski said. One might be whether the program should continue given its cost and the fact that is already behind schedule, he said.
It may also find that the program should continue marching forward except that, based on changing border security needs, the order for deploying the system in different Border Patrol Sector needs to be arranged, Borkowski said. Another possibility is that based on cost effectiveness analyses, more limited deployments of the technology should be made in certain areas or not at all, he added.
This part “is longer term” Borkowski said. “Should we continue with the path that says, ‘cover all of the border with SBInet Block 1 or should we pick and choose based on a cost effectiveness analysis once we’ve got more experience with what SBInet can actually do?’ We can make better judgments about where it is cost effective as opposed to where it is not.”
The review could also alter the types of systems deployed, both in the near-term and long-term. The Border Patrol is already calling for immediate help in monitoring new routes of illegal migration, Borkowski said. To that end, Borkowski’s office recently issued a Request for Proposals for mobile surveillance systems that can be purchased relatively quickly and deployed by the Border Patrol, he said.
Through the Recovery Act, CPB has $15 million currently available to spend on its Mobile Surveillance Capability. Borkowski said that the agency plans to select one or two vendors to provide systems with an award currently planned for the spring time. He expects to purchase between 10 and 30 systems with the current funding. The agency has a requirement for up to 88 systems depending on the availability of funding in the future.
Regarding the SBInet system and component issues, Borkowski said that some of these have already been fixed but others arose after additional qualification testing and once the first set of towers were constructed in the Tucson, Ariz., Border Patrol Sector last summer. The earlier problems included radar accelerations and computer crashes.
“Those are largely fixed, in fact I think they are fixed, I’m just being cautious,” he said.
But the new round of System Qualification Testing uncovered some other “bugs,” which some may consider “annoyances” and other “significant,” Borkowski said. For example, a system might “freeze up” or “lock up and restart on its own,” he added.
One problem, which he said appears to be rare, deals with video recorders. If a camera isn’t on, the recorder that is part of that system may be used to record video from another camera. But when the other camera is turned back on, the video recorder won’t always switch back over, he said.
As for sensors on towers that have been constructed, called Tucson-1, occasionally a camera will have a bug or there is an issue with the grounding, Borkowski said.
“Those kind of things,” Borkowski said of the problems that are cropping up. “Not a lot of them but enough I really don’t want to go into testing until I’m pretty convinced we’ve got the vast majority of this stuff locked out. And, again, that takes time.”
The testing he is referring to is System Acceptance Testing, which was supposed to be completed this past December, and operational testing by the Border Patrol, which was to get underway this month.
Borkowski said that the System Acceptance Testing is now several months away from starting and will take longer than originally expected. He’s hoping to finish this testing sometime in the summer and then hand it over to the Border Patrol for operational testing.
The delays stem from the addition qualification tests and the schedule will stretch because Borkowski wants to validate system performance in an operational environment. That validation will involve sending CBP or known personnel through migration routes to generate statistically relevant samples to prove out the system, such as meeting probability of detection requirements, he said.
In addition, the Border Patrol wants to see if more or fewer of its command center personnel operate the system than is currently called for. The system is designed to have one agent control two sensor towers, Borkowski said. That will be tested in the System Acceptance round.
After that is done, CBP will then do another round of testing to see if one agent can manage three towers at once. This will add time, but it is important to meet the Border Patrol’s needs, Borkowski said.
If all goes well, the next major decision milestone for deploying SBInet beyond Tucson-1 and another section known as Ajo-1, will likely be in 2011, Borkowski said. That comes after the operational testing. CBP had hoped that acquisition decision milestone would take place by this summer.
Boeing [BA] is the prime contractor responsible for system integration of SBInet.