War, the military, COIN and stuff

Border Competition

We’ve been waiting since October for Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to make a decision on the fate of SBInet, the Boeing-designed suite of cameras, ground sensors and radar systems that provide real-time, streaming intel to American border patrol officers standing watch over the U.S./Mexican border.

The program has cost $1.2 billion since 2006—with $800 million of that going to SBInet technologies, and the rest to road grading and fencing along the border—with only 53 mi. of the Arizona border having been covered by the gear. This led Napolitano to order a freeze on the program pending a top-to-bottom review in February, with orders for Customs and Border Protection to report back to her in October with their assessment of where the program stands, and where it can feasibly go in the near term.

While the October deadline was met, we still don’t know what the secretary’s decision is.

With many observers betting that the SBInet program won’t survive—despite the fact that agents in the field love the gear, as I reported in the November DTI—competitors are starting to enter the arena to fill the gaps in border security.

One contender is Raytheon’s Clear View, which a Raytheon representative says is essentially “a command and control system that manages situational awareness.” Designed as a modular system that can “plug and play” with a variety of other data systems, Clear View allows cameras and sensors to track moving objects automatically while storing the information for later use, allowing the operator to perform other tasks and analyze later, if needed.

Read the rest at ARES.....

Violence Along the Arizona Border

Last night, just north of Nogales, Ariz., Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry was shot and killed after coming in contact with several suspicious men near Rio Rico, Ariz.  Four suspects have been taken into custody while another is still at large, according to the Customs and Border Patrol.

Back in September I had the chance to spend a day with Border Patrol agents around Nogales, doing a story both on what they contend with on a daily basis, as well as how they use sensing technologies to help them do their jobs.

The area around Nogales is part of the Tucson Sector, which is the most active alone the entire border. Covering only 262 mi. of border, the sector still managed to account for 1 million lb. of marijuana seized in Fiscal 2010, and 203,000 illegal border crossers detained. Tucson also has the distinction of being the test bed for the Homeland Security Department’s huge and controversial SBInet program, part of its larger Secure Border Initiative. SBI was initiated in 2005 to add fencing, paved and graded roads and install SBInet technologies such as radar, sensors, cameras and other communications gear along the border.

Five years on, and $800 million later, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a freeze on the program pending a top-to-bottom review. At the time, nine towers in the Tucson Sector had been completed, and by late October six more were conducting limited operations in the Ajo Sector. Still, the agents on the ground loved the gear, which gives them real-time access to radar and camera feeds, and increases both their safety, as well as their response time.

Read the whole thing at ARES

Navy, Marines Game Out Their Future

U.S. Navy delivering humanitarian supplies ashore in Colombia. (Pic: Paul McLeary)

With the Marine Corps leadership itching to get “expeditionary” again and start placing their Marines back on U.S. Naval vessels after a decade fighting in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, the sea services are starting from square one.

On December 11, the Navy and Marine Corps kicked off Bold Alligator, a simulation that marks the largest joint fleet simulated amphibious exercise in the last 10 years. Brig. Gen. Christopher S. Owens of the II Marine Expeditionary Force, the Marine component of Exercise Bold Alligator, said in a conference call last week that while it's the first brigade-level amphibious exercise in quite some time, “it's also a first step in our revitalization of our amphibious proficiency with larger or brigade-size units” after a decade of kicking sand.

The synthetic exercise—a real, physical exercise is planned for 2012—will be run out of Norfolk from two amphibious assault ships, the USS Bataan and USS Iwo Jima, and will simulate a “hybrid threat environment where U.S. forces have been requested by friendly nations to help bring a measure of security and stability to the area,” Owens said. “With one nation, we'll support their fight against an externally-supported insurgency and repel foreign invaders from within their borders; at the same time, in a neighboring country, we will likely conduct a noncombatant evacuation operation of U.S. citizens in the midst of sectarian violence that is related to the more conventional conflict next door.”

Read the rest at ARES...

New Wars: Drug Cartels Destabilizing Neighbors

US Army Chief Gen George Casey inspects Mexican Special Forces. (Pic: US Army)

Over the past half decade Mexico has been the scene of some of the world’s most grotesque violence—car bombs, beheadings, mass executions, unlucky souls dipped in chemical baths or lit on fire—in a multifront war that pits the government against powerful drug cartels, the cartels against one another, and both against innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

The result of this violence has been the murder of 30,000 Mexican civilians since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels after his election in 2006. Calderon sent 50,000 troops into the streets to try and take back some of the ungoverned spaces carved out by outfits like the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel and others who reap the benefits of an estimated $19 to $29 billion in yearly drug and smuggling profits, but the results have been anything but conclusive.

It is important to note however, that Calderón’s policies didn’t create this spasm of violence, they simply helped inflame an already volatile situation brought about by myriad social and political changes that feed the growth and the bloodlust of the cartels.

But what has caused the recent orgy of violence? Paradoxically, according to a study by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute (PDF!), it was successful crackdown on the gangs by the Mexican government: “Each successive disruption of drug trafficking networks has intensified conflict and competition among organized crime groups, thereby contributing to unprecedented, high intensity violence.” As a result of the growing strength and power of the cartels, and the poor training, equipping and support for local police, large swaths of northern Mexico have become ungoverned spaces, resulting in the killing fields of Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.5  million just across the border from El Paso, Tx., which saw 2,700 murders in 2009, and which is on pace to top 3,000 for 2010.

Please read the rest at ARES....

Tough Cuts: Marines Have Choices to Make

In the December issue of DTI, Kimberly Johnson, Mike Fabey and I have a story about some of the USMC's big ticket programs, and the challenges they'll face in staying afloat in the upcoming budget squeeze:

Many in and out of the Pentagon thought the EFV was on its way to the junk heap by mid-2010. Gates had the program in his sights and no one was sure what kind of support Amos would lend. Like other programs that have been decades in development, the EFV became a target for defense industry reformers who questioned the relevance of equipment they say is more suited to warfare from another era.

For example, it is designed to carry a large enough gun to engage hostile armored vehicles but not—in its basic form—to withstand large mines or improvised explosive devices.

The kind of amphibious assault landings for which the EFV was initially designed no longer make sense, critics added. But Amos presents a new idea of what constitutes an amphibious landing. In his first planning guidance, released in October, he cites global disasters in Haiti and Pakistan that required the deployment of 5,000 Marines from seven amphibious ships. Amos also made clear in his guidance that he was for anything that bolstered the Marines’ expeditionary capabilities.

“The Marine Corps is America’s expeditionary force in readiness,” he wrote in the guidance, which mentions “expeditionary” 15 times. “To a Marine, the term ‘expeditionary’ is more than a slogan; it is our state of mind. It drives the way we organize our forces, how we train and what kind of equipment we buy.” The defining expeditionary tool now is the EFV.

Read the whole thing here.

Unmanned, Underground, Uncovered

One of the things that the Wikileaks diplomatic cables open up to view is the complicated and shadowy world of international arms transfers--how one sale might lead to another, and then another to an unfriendly power, or how two companies from different countries  might actually provide banned items to a third party. It's hardly shocking that these things happen, but it's facinating to see how they're handled quietly though some diplomatic arm-twisting.

One State Dept. cable from March 24, 2009 titled “SHIPMENT OF UAVS FROM IRAN TO VENEZUELA” shows how tight of a lid U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to keep on the export of arms to and from nations it considers unfriendly. The report states that

Venezuelan officials expected to receive a shipment of UNMANNED aerial vehicles (UAV) and related material from Iran, via Turkey, by May 2009. As of early March, Venezuelan officials believed that the equipment would be repackaged and labeled as electronic equipment, then transported overland from Iran to Turkey. Once in Turkey, the equipment would be loaded onto a maritime vessel for continued shipment to Venezuela. The U.S. believes this shipment constitutes arms and related materiel, which Iran is prohibited from transferring pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1747, paragraph 5.

In January 2009, acting on another tip from U.S. officials, the Turkish government stopped an Iranian attempt to ship drums of nitrate and sulphite chemicals and dismantled laboratory instruments to Venezuela, by shipping them through Turkey.

Read the rest at ARES...

Secretary Gates on Wikileaks

In the Q&A portion of the press conference unveiling the Pentagon's landmark Don't Ask Don't Tell survery, Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen took questions on the other big story this week -- the publication of over 200,000 stolen diplomatic cables sent by American officials overseas which has been been blowing up front pages all week. (Actually, less than 300 cables have been published so far, in a strategy that Wikileaks is using to keep the story "fresh" for as long as it can.) While Gates and Mullen and a host of other DoD officials have commented on the leak, Gates' comments yesterday were pretty remarkable.

If you'll allow me to quote at length,it's worth reading the whole thing.

    First of all, I would say unlike the Pentagon Papers, one of the things that is important, I think, in all of these releases, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq or the releases this week, is the lack of any significant difference between what the U.S. government says publicly and what these things show privately, whereas the Pentagon Papers showed that many in the government were not only lying to the American people, they were lying to themselves.

But let me – let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time.  Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time.  And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases.  And this is a quote from John Adams:  “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.”

When we went to real congressional oversight of intelligence in the mid-’70s, there was a broad view that no other foreign intelligence service would ever share information with us again if we were going to share it all with the Congress.  Those fears all proved unfounded.

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on.  I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought.  The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.  

Many governments – some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us.  We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us.  They will continue to work with us.  We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing?  Yes.  Is it awkward?  Yes.  Consequences for U.S. foreign policy?  I think fairly modest.

Published at ARES...

Army Issues New Guidelines for Ground Combat Vehicle Program

The U.S. Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle Project Manager Col. Anthony DiMarco told reporters this morning that the Army is looking at “a target range of $9 million to $10.5 million” average unit manufacturing cost for the GCV, billed as the Army’s replacement for the aging M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. Scheduled to be completed by 2017, the Army expects to start a buy of 1,874 GCV Infantry Fighting Vehicles around that time.

DiMarco was speaking to announce the rollout of the second Request for Proposals to industry, (the first one went out in February 2010), which was released this morning. After putting the program on hold in August with the promise to issue a new RFP within 60 days, the Army missed its target by about a month, but DiMarco said that the service is still on track to award up to three contracts for the Technology Development phase in April 2011.

Proposals from industry are due on the 21^st of January, he said, which shouldn't be a problem since three contractor teams have long since linked up to try and win the contract: BAE Systems-Northrop Grumman; General Dynamics Land Systems along with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon; and SAIC-led team that includes Boeing, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, and Rheinmetall.

“We did not have affordability targets” in the first RFP, DiMarco said, but due to the new fiscally-conscious times, the new RFP does include such targets, such as capping each technology development contract at a ceiling of $450 million for each contractor under a fixed-price incentive contract, and if any competitor goes over that limit, that money comes out of their own pocket. The Army is also looking for costs of about $200 per operating mile, which DiMarco explained is “an initial target which we will refine as we go through the [technology development] phase.” Comparatively, Bradleys are about 100 dollars per operating mile, while the Abrams tank is closer to $300 per operating mile.

Posted at ARES...

Never Mind What's Been Selling, It's What You're Buying

Looking down the list of the names of the top five nations who make up the biggest international suppliers of conventional weapons, it reads pretty much just how you think it might. Over the past half-decade, the United States, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom have shipped the most weapons overseas, with the U.S. and Russia making up over half of the total, exporting 30 percent and 23 percent of all arms, respectively.

Of that total, combat aircraft accounted for a full 48 percent of all U.S. weapons exports, and 27 percent of the total exported by all countries overall—a number that rises to 33 percent when related weapons and components are factored in according to a new report released by SIPRI, a Swedish think tank that focuses on arms control and global conflict.

The author of the report, Siemon T. Wezeman, warns that unlike other conventional weapons, combat aircraft “are among the weapons with the greatest potential to cause instability” due to their ability to strike fast, and from long distances. Because such planes are so expensive to both purchase and maintain, their existence in any one country’s arsenal “may shape the direction of defence policy and doctrine for many years,” he adds. The numbers of aircraft that the United States and Russia have exported over the past five years aren’t insignificant, with the U.S. having shipped 331 new F-16C, F/A-18E and F-15E aircraft, while Russia has sent 215 Su-25, Su-27, Su-30 and MiG-29 aircraft overseas.

As it stands today, eleven different countries manufacture combat aircraft: China, France, India, Japan, Russia, Sweden; while Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK together produce the Eurofighter Typhoon, of which only 24 aircraft have been sold to other countries since 2005. China has manufactured and shipped “about” 41 F-7 and JF-17 aircraft, and “while it has a substantial order for the JF-17 from Pakistan (reported as 50–150 units), there is no great prospect of large orders from other countries and production of the J-10 and other combat aircraft for national use will continue to outnumber exports,” Wezeman reports.

Please read the rest at ARES...

Marines Sending in the Tanks

There has been some skepticism over the Marine Corps’ decision to send a company of M1 Abrams tanks to join the battle in southern Afghanistan, but the use of tanks in a counterinsurgency in general, and in Afghanistan in particular, is hardly new.

In Afghanistan, the Canadians and the Danes have used their tanks to great effect--and Canadian Army Maj. Trevor Cadieu has written a detailed acocunt on how tanks became an integral part of the Canadian fight in Kandahar—the place U.S. Marines are fighting now. In December 2006, the Canadians deployed a squadron of Leopard C2 tanks to Kandahar, and he Major writes that “after deploying forward… the tank squadron and armoured engineers featured prominently in all major combat operations undertaken by the Canadian BG… Since May 2007, the tank squadron has fought almost constantly alongside Canadian and Afghan infantry in close combat with the Taliban.”

The Canadians say that they’ve found so much success in Afghanistan with the German-made Leopard tank that they completely revised plans for the structure of their ground forces. In 2001, the Canadians decided not to replace their aging fleet of Leopard I tanks—the plan was to simply ride them until they died and then transition to a lighter force structure using the Stryker-like LAV infantry carriers as their heaviest piece of equipment. It wasn’t long before the heavy fighting and the toll that powerful roadside bombs Canadian troops encountered in southern Afghanistan changed this calculus, however, prompting the Ottawa government to kick off a “crash program” to buy surplus German and Dutch Leopard II tanks, which began arriving in Afghanistan in 2008.

Please  read the rest of this post over at ARES

McCain, Unbound

Speaking at a daylong gathering sponsored by the new conservative/neocon foreign policy shop the Foreign Policy Initiative this morning, Sen. John McCain said that he is concerned about the isolationist tendencies of some his incoming Congressional Republican colleagues, and made some very pointed remarks about the Russian government.

Speaking with the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, McCain said that “I worry, I worry a lot,” about his new Republican colleagues in Congress when it comes to their attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing mission in Iraq. He singled out “I think there are going to be some tensions within our party,” he said, “and I don’t know incoming Senator Rand Paul—I respect him, I admire his victory—but already he is talking about withdrawals, and cuts in defense, and a number of others are [as well.]”

Paul, who has said that he hasn’t thought much about the war in Afghanistan and that “can we say that gradually we don't need as large of an Army if we're not in two wars? Yes, I think you can say that. You can save money there,” is a bit of an unknown on where exactly he stands on defense issues. But he is clearly making some Republicans nervous.             

But it isn’t just Paul that McCain is concerned about. He seems wary of the entire crop of Tea Part-endorsed Republicans currently making their way to D.C. for their freshman orientation. “There’s no doubt that this new group of Republicans have come in with a commitment to take an axe to spending,” McCain continued. “I’m not sure that you could say, ok, everything in defense is sacrosanct, while the rest of these cuts in education and social programs are taking place, so I worry a lot about the rise of protectionism and isolationism in the Republican party.”

Please read the rest at ARES...

Linked In: New Ad Hoc Networks In the Works

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the Pentagon’s experimental research and development arm that thinks up new ideas and then pushes them as far out on a limb as they can – is trying to come up with a new, relatively inexpensive networked radio system that can keep soldiers in austere environments connected. And according to one engineer working on the project, they’re pretty close to wrapping it up.

Called the Wireless Network after Next (WNaN), the idea is to take inexpensive, upgradable commercial off the shelf radio components, harden them for military use, and issue each soldier his own radio.

DARPA has tapped Raytheon’s BBN Technologies to work on the network and Cobham to work on the radios. Jeff Feinberg of Raytheon’s BBN Technologies explains that the goal of the program is to produce radios that cost about $500 each, and can be easily swapped out every few years as technologies improve. He compared it to how civilians treat their cell phones. “Your phone is just an access device,” he explains, “all the smarts are in the network itself, and they get you to throw your phone away every two years and get a new phone that can get more use out of the network. That’s really where this program is trying to head—to make that radio an access device and drive all the high level performance to the network so the Army doesn’t have to reinvent and reinvest in a lot of new hardware every year.” Essentially, the Army will buy the network once, while tossing the inexpensive radios out every few years for better models that can exploit more of the network.

Readthe rest at ARES...

The Navy's Submarine Problem

My colleague Mike Fabey had a piece up yesterday about a new Congressional Research Service report that lays out some inconvenient facts about the future of the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet.

In short, the Navy doesn’t seem to have figured out a way to align its stated need for 48 submarines with its build schedule for new Virginia class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), or its yearly shipbuilding budget.

The Navy’s so-called 30-year shipbuilding plan, as updated for Fiscal 2009 and earlier years, showed the SSN force recovering to 48 boats by the early 2030s, the CRS pointed out. But the latest update indicated that benchmark may not be made after all. “The Navy’s new Fiscal 2011 30-year (fiscal years 2011-2040) plan shows the SSN remaining below 48 boats through 2040. The change is due to a reduction in planned SSN procurements,” CRS reported. “The Fiscal 2009 plan included procurement of 53 SSNs over 30 years, while the Fiscal 2011 plan includes procurement of 44 SSNs over 30 years.”

The reduction in SSN procurements in the Fiscal 2011 plan, the CRS reported, may be due in large part to the planned procurement of 12 next-generation SSBNs (nuclear-powered strategic ballistic-missile submarines) in Fiscal 2019-2033. “The Fiscal 2009 plan did not account for the cost of these 12 SSBNs, while the Fiscal 2011 does, apparently causing reductions in planned procurement rates for SSNs and other types of ships during that period,” the CRS reported.

Read the rest at ARES...

What Will the New Littoral Combat Ships Cost?

With the news this morning that the Navy wants to split the buy for twenty new Littoral Combat Ships through 2015—ten from Lockheed Martin and ten from Austal and General Dynamics—it’s instructive to take a quick look at how we got to such an odd moment in a long and odd acquisition process.

Originally slated to cost $220 million per ship when the program was launched in 2002, the first two ships out of the dock had blown that number apart by time they hit the water. In documents that accompanied the 2010 Navy budget request, it was learned that the Lockheed-built ship, the USS Freedom, wound up clocking in at $637 million, while the General Dynamics/Austal-built USS Independence came in at $704 million. Shocking perhaps, but hardly surprising given the confusion that has marked the program from the beginning, which included cancellation of the LCS 3 and 4 builds in 2007, followed by a quick reversal. An angry Congress got into the game by slapping a cost cap of $480 million per ship beginning this year, a figure the Navy has admitted neither company could meet. While Lockheed is currently reporting that LCS 3 is more than 60% complete, General Dynamics/Austal continues work in silence. A spokesman for the team told DTI that it will have no comment on the LCS 4 build at Austal USA shipyards in Alabama before the Navy issues its contract award....

Read the rest at ARES...

New Technologies Aid Border Patrol

I’ve written a few blog posts about the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative, and its SBInet program, which was initiated in 2005 by the DHS to further secure the southern border by adding a string of radar, sensors, cameras and other communications and surveillance gear mounted on towers.

Funded by a $3.6-billion allocation from Congress, Boeing has been the lead contractor on the SBI program since receiving a three-year contract in 2006 to integrate and implement the technologies, and as of February, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) had awarded Boeing about $800 million for the SBInet technologies. After five years of setbacks, technical problems, environmental controversies and cost overruns, in March Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a freeze on the program pending a top-to-bottom review. At the time, nine towers in Arizona’s Tucson Sector had been completed, and by late October six more were conducting limited operations in the Ajo Sector. In a possible sign of things to come, in March Napolitano diverted $50 million in federal stimulus funding intended for SBInet to other more near-term technologies, including $32 million for more mobile surveillance systems (MSS)—sensor towers mounted on trucks—forty of which are already in use on the border.

In the just-released November issue of DTI, I have a longer look at all of this, including reactions from Border Patrol agents, who are big supporters of the SBInet technologies.

Standing on a ridge overlooking the border fence in Nogales, Ariz., Paul Boulier, a 16-year Customs and Border Patrol veteran, says that when it comes to fighting the drug runners and immigrants flooding across the border, boots on the ground are the most important thing, but “as the technology has come out, it has helped us overall.” He points to the ZBV Backscatter Van, a mobile, low-energy X-ray system made by American Science and Engineering, as being “an awesome piece of technology” that has been extremely effective in helping agents scan vehicles crossing the border. The technology is also popular with Customs agents at maritime ports (and for that matter with U.S. forces protecting forwarding operating bases in Iraq).

Driving though the Tucson Sector in September, Border Patrol agent Jose Verdugo said that most agents are big fans of SBInet technologies, as “they are helping us effect the right response.” Most important is the officer safety component. “We’re able to see what’s coming at us. It offers us greater ability to interdict groups on our terms rather than their terms.”

Traditionally, agents would be alerted to movement in their sector when an unmanned ground sensor in the desert was tripped, and they would be sent out to investigate. Most of the time, Verdugo said, it would take agents at least 1-2 hr. to reach the area, by which time whatever had tripped the sensor was long gone. With the SBInet system, agents in the command center see the activation of the sensor and are able to slew a camera over in real time, providing almost instant situational awareness. “With the SBInet cameras,” Verdugo continued, “we can monitor the group until they get to a place that’s more advantageous for us to apprehend them—where we have the higher ground and the advantage to make the operation on our terms.”

Read the rest of the story here….