Customs and Border Protection in early April said draft requests for proposals (RFPs) are expected to be issued in the third quarter of fiscal year 2022 for two key border security programs, one for sensor towers and the other for a centralized command and control platform.
The agency said it plans a multi-award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for the sensor tower effort, which is called the CBP Integrated Surveillance Tower (IST) Program and Consolidated Tower & Equipment Surveillance (CTSE). The common operating picture (COP) acquisition will be a small business set aside.
Initially, the CTSE effort will “provision existing surveillance tower capabilities” but CBP said it expects these vendors to be able to demonstrate that their solution can fully integrate with the COP, which could control the towers and exploit data.
The sensor data provided by the current IST towers are stove-piped into separate command and control platforms and rely on operators to continuously monitor their displays to detect, identify and track items of interest. CBP said its Border Patrol division, which uses the surveillance towers, wants more automation to reduce agent workloads.
“The Border Patrol has a need to reduce dependence on agents monitoring systems and traditionally manual functions,” CBP said. “Solutions that provide alerts and usable data to reduce the number of agents required to monitor and operate surveillance systems, and instead focus on classifying threats are desired.”
CBP has three primary surveillance tower programs that are being consolidated into the IST umbrella program. These efforts are the Autonomous Surveillance Towers (ASTs), which are provided by Anduril Industries, the Integrated Fixed Towers (IFTs), which are supplied by Elbit Systems of America [ESLT], and the Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS), supplied by General Dynamics [GD]. The senor towers can be deployed along the southern and northern borders and coastal areas.
The ASTs are scalable and easily relocatable and provide surveillance ranges of 1.5 miles for human targets and greater than 2.5 miles for vehicles. The systems also operate with 100 percent renewable power off-the grid. The IFTs include cameras, radar and laser sensors and can detect, track, identify and classify items of interest up to 6.2 miles away.
The Northern Border RVSS includes day and night cameras attached to fixed towers or existing structures at 18 locations along the northern border in Michigan and New York. The RVSS, which also include day and night cameras, are remote controlled and are used to monitor large areas of international border, particularly highly trafficked routes with illegal activity.
To ensure successful integration between the towers and the COP, CBP will require the CTSE vendors to publish interface documents and software development kits. The agency also said that it wants to leverage ongoing advances in commercial technologies, including 5G communications, mobile ad hoc networks, low cost, high bandwidth satellite communications, and similar technologies.
“CTSE vendors are encouraged to consider incorporating multiple flexible communications options,” CBP said.
Border Security Expo
Industry officials at the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas, in late March told HSR they are eyeing the forthcoming solicitation to see what the Border Patrol’s needs are for a new tranche of surveillance systems that will be used to monitor and detect activity along the nation’s borders between the ports of entry.
Industry officials expect that the forthcoming RFP for the COP, and possibly even the sensor systems procured under the CTSE effort, will require artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that autonomously sort out items of interest to alert operators and dismiss innocuous activity such as animals. Anduril’s AST systems, combined with the company’s LATTICE command and control (C2) platform, already offers AI/ML benefits to the Border Patrol.
Elbit’s Integrated Fixed Towers and the company’s TORCH C2 platform also includes AI/ML features.
Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz told attendees at the conference that he’s looking to “capitalize on both the fusion of technology, the fusion of information, and making sure that those front-line agents have the resources that they need.”
Ortiz said he expects by the end of March the Border Patrol will have encountered more than 1 million migrants illegally trying to enter the U.S., mostly along the nation’s southwest border, since the start of the federal fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2021. Current and former Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security officials at the event said the numbers are “overwhelming.”
In fiscal year 2021, the Border Patrol apprehended nearly 1.7 million illegal migrants. At the current rate of encounters, the agency will top that number by more than 16 percent in FY ’22, Robert Bonner, the fist commissioner of CBP during the administration of George W. Bush, told attendees.
Sean McGoffin, chief of the Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector, which covers 517 miles of river front along the Rio Grande River in Texas, told reporters at the expo that the current sensor systems give his agents situational awareness that “gives us an idea of what threats we’re looking at and what’s going on in our AOR (area of responsibility), and then we can prioritize that and be more efficient and effective in our processes and how we deploy our manpower and what we do to interdict that.”
For the CTSE effort, based on earlier draft statements by CBP, which is the parent organization to the Border Patrol, industry officials are expecting small, medium and large variants of tower systems and related sensor packages. CBP previously said that it expects to select one or more vendors for the program.
FY ’23 Request
In late March, the Biden administration released the federal budget request for fiscal year 2023, which shows a $13.5 million increases for the IST program in the operation and support account. The budget documents for the Department of Homeland Security exclude the enacted amounts for FY ’22, presumably because the administration didn’t have time to add them since Congress didn’t agree on a final budget until nearly mid-March. Fiscal year 2022 began on Oct. 1, 2021.
Congressional appropriators added $21 million for the AST program to the FY ’22 request. The administration said the base for this program is $12.4 million for the program.
The IFT and RVSS programs, which had base funding of $15.8 million and $35.1 million respectively, are not mentioned in the FY ’22 omnibus spending package.
The FY ’23 request says the funding will support the operations and maintenance of 433 RVSS legacy and upgrade towers, 36 RVSS towers on the northern border, 50 IFT towers and 204 AST towers.
Congress provided $5 million for a COP pilot in the FY ’22 budget under CBP’s acquisition account. The agency is seeking $16.5 billion for the program in FY ’23. The request says the funding will allow the stand up and operation of a help desk for end-user support and fund cloud computing and data circuits to operate the COP.
Within CBP’s acquisition account in FY ’23, the administration is seeking $20.2 million for the COP, which will lead to an initial operational capability status with a deployment at the Border Patrol’s station in Douglas, Ariz., with additional deployments planned in Santa Teresa Station and Del Rio Station in Texas, and Campo Station in San Diego.