Thread: Boeing Said to Be Selected to Lead Border Program

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/washi ... ecure.html

September 20, 2006
Boeing Said to Be Selected to Lead Border Program
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 — After a face-off among large military contractors, the Boeing Company was picked by the Homeland Security Department to lead a high-tech effort to secure borders, Congressional officials who were briefed on the decision said Tuesday.

The contract will at least initially be much more limited than some industry officials had expected, valued at $80 million instead of the $2 billion estimate given for the six-year deal, the officials said.

Boeing will be asked to install or at least help supervise the installation of a combination of sensors, cameras, fences, vehicle barricades and small unmanned aerial vehicles starting near Tucson, which has some of the heaviest traffic of illegal immigrants.

Boeing beat out teams led by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Ericsson based on a plan that put far less emphasis on costly unmanned aerial vehicles.

Wayne Esser, who led the Boeing bid, said the company’s strategy focused on coming up with a solution that could be expanded to all 7,500 miles of the United States border without compromising the ability of the Homeland Security Department to pay for its many antiterrorism initiatives.

“This is not a Department of Defense type of procurement,” Mr. Esser said in an interview before his company was notified of its selection. “Customs and Border Protection just doesn’t have that kind of a budget.”

The program, the Secure Border Initiative, is a central element of the Bush administration’s plan to curtail illegal immigration. The president also wants a temporary-worker program to give legal standing to many illegal immigrants already in this country.

The Senate may vote as early as Wednesday on bills to direct the department to build a 700-mile two-layer fence between Mexico and the United States, about a third of the shared border. The House has passed the proposal.

Such a fence could require fewer of the high-tech measures that Boeing would provide.

Because major gaps on that border would remain and because there are no plans for a large-scale fence along the Canadian border, the alternative methods of monitoring thousands of miles would continue to be necessary.

Under the Boeing plan, towers would be built along the border with radar systems to watch for movement, as well as cameras that could zoom in on movements to determine whether the subject was a vehicle, animals or people.

Ground sensors to detect movement, sound or simply contact would be installed, particularly where tree coverage makes the radar and cameras less effective, Mr. Esser said.

Northrop Grumman had proposed using an unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone known as the Global Hawk, that flies as high as 65,000 feet for up to 34 hours, to help monitor the border. Each vehicle can cost tens of millions of dollars.

Lockheed Martin had proposed using, among other tools, a high-altitude balloon known as a tethered aerostat that flies at up to 15,000 feet and, weather permitting, can be left up for a long time.

The Boeing proposal includes small, relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles that can be launched from a pickup truck by an agent in the field and then fly for, perhaps, 90 minutes. These vehicles could help apprehend illegal immigrants, but they would not be routinely used to monitor large stretches of the border.

The Boeing team also looked for ways to reduce the cost of sending out Border Patrol agents, by figuring out how long it could allow illegal immigrants, even after they have been detected across the border, to continue walking or driving before it would be necessary to seize them.

“We don’t have to pick them up in the desert,” Mr. Esser said. “We can pick them up once they reach the road.”

The contract could still turn into a deal worth up to $2 billion for Boeing over the next six years.

Winning this contract will help the company sell its services to other countries looking to secure their borders.

Among contractors, this was considered one of the three most important contracts offered by the Homeland Security Department. The others involved rebuilding the Coast Guard fleet of ships, helicopters and planes and creating a tracking system for visitors who enter the United States legally.

Members of Congress have expressed some skepticism about whether the department will be able to succeed in this border effort because of the failure of previous ones.

“Achieving operational control of both the northern and southern border — nearly 7,500 miles — within five years is an enormous, but important, undertaking,” Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said Tuesday. “Huge technical, geographic and personnel challenges remain.

“Nevertheless, my colleagues and I are prepared to give D.H.S. the resources it needs — provided funding is linked to results — to get the job done.”

Boeing Wins Deal For Border Security

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 20, 2006; A01



Aerospace and defense giant Boeing Co. has won a multibillion-dollar contract to revamp how the United States guards about 6,000 miles of border in an attempt to curb illegal immigration, congressional sources said yesterday.

Boeing's proposal relied heavily on a network of 1,800 towers, most of which would need to be erected along the borders with Mexico and Canada. Each tower would be equipped with a variety of sensors, including cameras and heat and motion detectors.
The company's efforts would be the basis of the government's latest attempt to control U.S. borders after a series of failures. The contract, part of the Secure Border Initiative and known as SBInet, will again test the ability of technology to solve a problem that lawmakers have called a critical national security concern. This time, the private sector is being given an unusually large say in how to do it.

Boeing sold its plan to the Homeland Security Department as less risky and less expensive than competing proposals that would have relied heavily on drones for routine surveillance work. Boeing plans only limited use of small unmanned aerial vehicles that could be launched from the backs of Border Patrol trucks when needed to help pursue suspects.

The system is to be installed first along the Mexican border in an area south of Tucson known to be a key crossing point for illegal immigrants. The company has said it can deploy the system along both borders within three years.The public announcement of the award is planned for tomorrow. Several congressional and industry sources yesterday confirmed that Boeing had defeated four other companies in one of the most closely watched and intensely fought contract competitions this year. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the competition. Homeland Security spokesman Larry Orluskie said the department was "really close" to making an award.

Boeing officials declined to comment, pending official notification. In an interview this month, Boeing executive Wayne Esser said that despite the company's aviation experience, it wanted to keep its border surveillance systems on the ground. "The aerial platform just goes off the map from a cost standpoint," he said.

Homeland Security has been criticized harshly in recent years for initiatives that have either failed or far exceeded their budgets. In one case, cameras that the department installed on the borders broke down in bad weather.

"The administration has spent $429 million of the taxpayer's money to try and secure our borders with two already-abandoned border security programs," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss). He expressed concern that the same thing will happen to SBInet.

Mindful of that record, Boeing emphasized that all its technology has been proven to work. "The low-risk approach is probably going to carry weight here," Esser said.

From the beginning, department officials told industry leaders that they wanted immediate results. The contract proposed giving the private sector wide latitude in helping U.S. Customs and Border Protection figure out the right combination of technology, infrastructure and personnel needed to stop immigrants, terrorists and criminals from illegally crossing into the United States.

Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Michael P. Jackson said this year that he wanted the companies "to come back and tell us how to do our business."

SBInet has been regarded all year by many industry executives as a critical prize, since the Homeland Security Department's budget continues to boom and no single company has emerged to dominate the market.

As a result, there was pitched competition among defense companies for a contract that is estimated to be worth about $2.5 billion over the next four years. The contest included five prime contractors -- Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., Raytheon Co., Ericsson Inc. and Boeing. Each rounded up dozens of subcontractors, bringing a wide variety of defense and technology firms into the competition.

Boeing's subcontractors include a Washington division of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. and a Reston division of information technology firm Unisys Corp.

Boeing has been one of the Defense Department's largest contractors for decades, and has been trying to win Homeland Security awards since the department was created.

In pursuing this contract, Boeing pointed to its work installing explosive-detection systems at more than 400 airports in less than six months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But that contract was criticized by the Homeland Security's inspector general's office, which found that Boeing received $49 million in excess profit on a deal that was supposed to be worth $508 million but ballooned to $1.2 billion. Investigators also found that Boeing had subcontracted 92 percent of the work, and that the machines had high false-alarm rates. The company disputed those findings.

Winning SBInet is considered an important victory for Boeing as it seeks to overcome a number of recent setbacks, including a scandal in which a Pentagon official admitted favoring the company in exchange for a job, and the loss this summer in the competition to build the next U.S. manned spacecraft.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 15_pf.html

Bad part : A Swedish company holds the patent on the electronic surveillance system and this may go to court.