I wrote this piece for the now-defunct Homeland Defense Journal. It was never published.
by DAVID AXE
As North Dakota’s Red River rose to record levels in late March, the Department of Homeland Security and partner agencies raced to save Fargo from a potentially devastating flood. The National Guard stacked sandbags. A FEMA flood team stockpiled relief supplies. Coast Guard boat and helicopter crews snatched residents and their pets from inundated houses along the river’s banks.
Overseeing all of this was one of DHS’s newest and most sophisticated systems: a two-ton, 36-foot-long Predator B Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, painted in the blue and gray of Customs and Border Patrol, winging silently overhead, using electro-optical and infrared cameras to search for people needing rescue.
The remote-controlled aircraft — one of six in the CBP inventory — is an unarmed version of the Air Force’s MQ-9 Reaper, itself an enlarged, more powerful variant of the basic Predator drone that entered service in the mid 1990s. The Air Force’s Predators and Reapers are among the most important weapons in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Their high-fidelity sensors, precision weapons and long endurance make them ideal for spotting, and killing, elusive enemies in a cluttered environment. CBP’s “civilianized” Predator Bs bring the same strengths — minus the weapons — to DHS’s border-security, disaster-relief and counter-terrorism missions.
A Predator B is typically operated by a pilot and a sensor specialist, linked to the robot by Ku-band satellite. The crew sits in a control booth that might be hundreds or even thousands of miles away at a major CBP facility. The robot itself often takes off and lands at a separate remote location staffed by ground crew and maintainers.
The blue and gray drone orbiting over Fargo was a sign of things to come. DHS officials are hoping to grow the agency’s small robot fleet in coming years, mirroring a trend in the military services that began around five years ago. The population of U.S. military robots has expanded more than tenfold since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and now numbers in the thousands. DHS’s robot force will remain tiny, in comparison. But robots’ improved capabilities will be as revolutionary for domestic missions as they have been for combat overseas.
But there’s a flip-side to the rise of Homeland Security robots. Perhaps surprisingly, the new robot force has strained CBP’s manpower. More worryingly, some observers fear that giving cutting-edge, military-style equipment to domestic agencies could result in a “militarization” of law enforcement.
Endurance Is Everything
Customs and Border Patrol has long relied on aircraft to enhance its operations. The agency operates around 275 manned aircraft flown by some 700 pilots, making it the world’s biggest law-enforcement air fleet — and that’s before counting hundreds of Coast Guard and other DHS manned aircraft that can assist with CBP missions. Aircraft belonging to each DHS agency can assist partner agencies. In that way, CBP assets can perform search and rescue, as in Fargo, while Coast Guard planes might help patrol the border.
Despite its size, this fleet has a major limitation. Many DHS aircraft are limited by the endurance of their human operators, which in the harshest conditions might be just a few hours. With some 6,000 miles of land border to patrol, even 500 aircraft isn’t enough, when those aircraft can stay on station only as long as their pilots can stay awake and focused.
For CBP, robots were the obvious solution, for robots don’t get tired and don’t have to devote space and weight to accommodating a human being. “The way our Predators are equipped, and the way we fly them, we can get an endurance of 18 to 20 hours out of one tank of gas,” says John Stanton, CBP’s Executive Director for National Air Security Operations. “That’s more than any other aircraft in the DHS fleet — Coast Guard C-130s, Customs P-3s, whatever.” A Predator B on an 18-hour mission might be remotely flown by several crews, working in shifts.
Customs and Border Patrol got into the robot game in August 2005, with the purchase of its first Predator B directly from the manufacturer, General Atomics, for $7 million. At the time, Predator B, a development of the Air Force’s basic Predator, represented the cutting edge of medium-weight, unmanned aircraft technology.
“The UAV technology will give us eyes where we previously didn’t have them,” CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner said in a news release. “This improves our ability to deter, detect and apprehend individuals conducting illegal activity, including smugglers, terrorists, and people attempting to illegally enter our country.
The first Predator B soon was flying operational missions over the U.S.-Mexico border, some lasting as long as 12 hours. By April, it had flown 900 hours, and helped agents arrest around 1,800 illegal immigrants and seize more than 200 pounds of marijuana. The first drone crashed on April 25 due to operator error. CBP replaced the destroyed drone and added five more.
This year the border service began flying Predators over the U.S.-Canada border. The northern deployment coincided with warnings, from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, that terrorists have crossed into the U.S. from Canada. “Some of these are well-known to the public — such as the Millennium Bomber — while others are not due to security reasons.” Ahmed Ressam, a Canada-based Al Qaeda operative, was arrested in Washington State in 1999 while attempting to reach California in order to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve — the so-called “Millennium Plot.”
The Predators seemed to exceed CBP’s high expectations. The robots have boosted the efficiency of the agency’s air and ground operations, Stanton says. “Thanks to their endurance, if there is a staging of bad people doing bad things and they’re headed this way, Predator allows the ground responding force not only to respond faster, but can triage that response. If Predator sees a group of five people walking in the desert, the response force does not have to send the whole cavalry. However, if it finds a group of 100 people, it can cue ground forces to send more help.”
There’s a softer side to this “triage” effect, Stanton adds. “Every summer in hot weather, there’s a problem with deaths in the desert: people making the trek to illegally immigrate, who didn’t bring enough subsistence as they make the trek … [these] people become dehydrated and some people die. With Predator, one of the sensors overhead is infrared, and with the difference in temperature, it can find these people who need to be rescued. It can save their lives. Similarly, it can triage response, [as in] here’s a person lying under a tree, not moving, who maybe needs the medics.”
Traffic Jam
CBP’s robot revolution hasn’t been without it hiccups. The Predators operate under restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which has worried about robots colliding with manned aircraft in heavily trafficked skies. CBP must ask FAA permission before flying its Predators. So far, the FAA has approved every request. But every approval “comes with strings attached,” Stanton says. “I have to prove to them that I’ve done enough predictive planning to make sure we’re not interfering with or endangering national airspace.”
More worryingly, CBP has struggled to recruit and train sufficient operators for its robot fleet. The military’s relentless demand for robot wranglers complicates CBP’s plans. Early on, Customs intended to train its Predator crews alongside the Air Force’s at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. “But they were so busy training their own [crews], it was once in a blue moon that we had a seat in training,” Stanton says. So CBP bought a training curriculum from General Atomics, hired instructors and now conducts Predator training at the agency’s own facilities.
But it’s one thing to establish a schoolhouse; it’s another to draw in students. “You would be stunned at how hard it is to find Predator pilots to hire,” Stanton says. “When I have a job announcement on the street, I don’t get that many applications because [robot operators] are tied up in the military or are [military] contractors — and a civil servant’s pay is nowhere close to what they currently make. It’s a glaring problem, one of the things that keeps John Stanton awake at night.”
The logistical problems have perhaps overshadowed a more fundamental ethical concern. Some critics have protested the use of military-style systems for border patrol and other homeland security missions, saying it represents a “militarization” of what should be strictly peaceful functions. “This specific technology has connotations of the ‘global war on terror,’ and military maneuvers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Ben Muller, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “Canadians are likely to perceive the introduction of these technologies within this sort of frame of reference.”
Moreover, there’s no clear need for drones over the Canadian border, Muller said. He called the Predator deployment a make-believe “theater of security” meant to gratify the American public. U.S. officials “have this idea that if it [the border] is watched, we’re all safer, but I’m very skeptical. They are the same people rolling out over and over again these examples that supposedly prove Canada is a terrorist hotbed.”
“It seems a palliative measure, but it does provide them with some assurances,” said Michael Kergin, a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S.
While opposition to the northern drone flights primarily originates in Canada, civil rights groups in the U.S. have objected to drones’ presence on the southern border, due to the controversial nature of illegal immigration from Mexico. Barry Steinhardt, from the American Civil Liberties Union, said drones’ stealthiness means that it’s impossible to know when authorities are monitoring civilian activity — and that raises ethical concerns. Drones might result in a “civil liberties-free zone along the border,” according to Lee Tien, an attorney with the California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Stanton defends CBP’s Predators — and, more broadly, the adoption of military gear by law-enforcement agencies. “A lot of the aircraft we’re fortunate enough have in our inventory are adaptations of military technology,” he says “Advances in military aviation have led to things civilians use every day — for instance, jets.”
Robot Bases
To accommodate its new robot fleet, CBP has invested in extensive infrastructure. For southern operations, a portion of the Predator force flies out of Sierra Vista, near Tucson. A facility near Grand Forks, North Dakota, support patrols along the Canadian border and also hosts CBP’s Predator schoolhouse. For future maritime patrols, CBP is planning a Florida location, too. But these permanent facilities do not represent the limits of Predator’s “deployability.” “You can take them anywhere, so long as the FAA allows,” Stanton says. Hurricane season often sees CBP Predators head to the Gulf Coast to assist in disaster relief.
While the Predators are scattered across the country, their human operators are concentrated at a new facility in Riverside, California called the Air and Marine Operations Centers, which ties together 450 military and FAA radars to provide unprecedented coverage of U.S. airspace. The CBP Predator team at AMOC includes two Coast Guardsmen, who represent the vanguard of the rescue service’s campaign to acquire its own robots.
“We watch their Predator program closely,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Gary Blore says of CBP. For its Florida-based maritime patrols, CBP is modifying one of its existing Predators to a new, “marinized” standard, including a special sea-scanning radar. The Coast Guard is considering buying this model and flying them alongside their CBP counterparts. The Coast Guard crews would share CBP’s AMOC control facilities. “We don’t want to duplicate CBP command and control,” Blore says.
Stanton says the partnership with the Coast Guard is also helping the rescue service build up a cadre of trained operators before it buys any robots. In that way, the Coast Guard might prevent the crew shortage that plagues CBP’s Predator operations.
Despite the difficulty in recruiting sufficient operators, CBP would like to add more robots to its fleet. Stanton says the agency originally wanted to buy around 14 Predators, and could make use of as many as 20, but the new presidential administration and the global recession have halted near-term additions. “We’re happy to have what we have, and seek to increase the number of trained crews, so each one [of the Predators] can be flying 18 hours a day. … We have plenty on our plate.”
(Photo: via Univ. of North Dakota)
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Senator Shines Some Sunlight on U.S. Killer Drone Ops
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the newer x-bot controlled jeeps will come in handy here aligned as well. AIf you have an empty jeep and a border agent it is easier to laod up more mules. A- on the tinted windows to throw off snipers mexican drug cartel members and illegals making a dash for it our naught. The element of surprise is key, not just weight ratios.
[...] United States Southern Command eyes expanding intelligence operations along Mexico’s southern border. Drones are already in the air (and also in North Dakota). [...]