Flying High and Fantastic Hunting for Marijuana

[Tom Barry]

Drones are in the news lately. Obama says he is keeping killer drones “on a tight leash” but won’t even acknowledge that it’s the CIA that directing drone hits. The president acknowledged that the State Department is also deploying drones – not for diplomacy but to keep its embassies safe. Although, of course, it’s not the State Department itself that will manage its drone programs but private contractors.

Here are two recent pieces on drones on the border. The first is an investigative look at the purported accomplishments of the border drones, exposing how inept CBP’s Office of Air and Marine is at playing the traditional border numbers game, while the second looks at drone boosterism at the House subcommittee that oversees the program.

Marijuana Predators on the Border

(Highlights from an investigative article on border drones recently published by Alternet:

Posted on January 16, 2012, Printed on February 1, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153735/dhs_pumping_money_into_drones_for_domestic_surveillance%2C_hunting_immigrants_and_seizing_pot )

Aside from a continuing funding bonanza for border security, to pursue its drone strategy DHS is also counting on the Federal Aviation Administration to continue authorizing the use of more domestic airspace by the unarmed drones.

And FAA seems set to comply, having approved 35 of the 36 requests by the department’s Customs and Protection agency from 2005 to mid-2010. In congressional testimony in July 2010, the FAA said it was streamlining its authorization process for drones, including the hiring of 12 additional staff to process drone airspace requests.

Since the inception of the UAS program, CBP has flown more than 12,000 UAS hours in support of border security operations and CBP partners in disaster relief and emergency response, including various state governments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The efforts of this program has led to the total seizure of approximately 46,600 pounds of illicit drugs and the detention of approximately 7,500 individuals suspected in engaging in illegal activity along the Southwest border.

One problem is the low numbers of seizures and apprehensions attributed to drone surveillance.
Another is that all the “narcotics” seizures CBP/OAM attributes to drone surveillance consist of bundles of Mexican-grown marijuana. That’s understandable since marijuana constitutes almost 100 percent of the drug seizures between the ports of entry along the southwestern border – more than 99 percent along the Arizona border.

Since 2005 the Border Patrol has seized 13.5 million pounds of cannabis. This does not include the border marijuana seizures by CBP agents working at the POEs or by other federal and local law enforcement officials.

Yet OAM, which first deployed drones in 2005, reports that drone surveillance has led to the seizure of a mere 46,600 pounds of marijuana. Drones, then, played a role in seizing less than one percent of the Border Patrol’s total marijuana in the past six years – to be exact only 0.003 percent.

On the “dangerous people” front, CBP reports that in the six years of the UAV program, drones have contributed to the apprehension of 7,500 suspected criminals detained. That’s small potatoes when compared to CBP’s overall number of detentions since 2005 – 5.7 million immigrants, including the 327,000 detained in 2011. Expressed as a percentage, amounts to only 0.001 percent.

Typically, CBP frames its UAVs as a fundamental instrument in combatting terrorism, even though no terrorists have ever been spotted or captured.

CBP says that the Predators play a “lead role in CBP's critical anti-terrorism mission.”
Two Predators also patrol the northern border, and Candice Miller, the Republican from Michigan who chairs the House Subcommittee on Border and Marine Security, complains that CBP is slighting northern border security.

The northern border Predators, however, haven’t led to a single interception of an illegal border crosser in the past two years.

CBP/OAM’s numbers game also includes variations of the numbers of arrests and seizures for the same number of flight hours. Celebrating reaching 10,000 hours of drone air time in June 2011, CBP/OAM released a press statement asserting that 10,000 hours of “UAS Predator operations have resulted in the apprehension of 4,865 undocumented aliens and 238 smugglers; the seizure of 33,773 pounds of contraband.”

Setting aside questions about why CBP/OAM can’t get its current numbers straight, the integrity and value of the drone program are also called into doubt by the unimpressive rate in the increased number of drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions reported by the agencies since 2006.
As more Predators are added to the CBP/OAM fleet, the rate of arrests and seizures has dropped dramatically.

A recent report by the Government Accounting Office on CBP’s high-tech border-security programs noted that the UAVs have “significant infrastructure costs with the highest cost risk.” Yet DHS continues to burn through its ever-expanding border security budget without apparent concern for cost-effectiveness or aptness in pursuing the DHS counterterrorism mission.

Declining Numbers as Predators Increase

Border state politicians like governors Jan Brewer and Rick Perry together with an array of congressional Democrats and Republicans – notably the leadership of the homeland security oversight committees (including Michael McCaul, Henry Cuellar, and Candice Miller) insist that the increased deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles is fundamental to securing the border.
But as Predator drones have increased, the number of marijuana seizures and arrests of illegal border crossers attributed to drone surveillance has dropped precipitously.

During the six months of operation of the ill-fated first border Predator (which crashed in the Arizona desert in April 2006), the drone accounted for nearly a third of the total 2005-2011 drone-related apprehensions and nearly one-fifth of total drug seizures.

As the number of CBP/OAM drones rise, the productivity – measured by the traditional performance measures of immigrants detained and drugs seized – of the UAV program has dropped precipitously.
The most recent CBP numbers, cited in the agency’s Dec. 27 media release, raise new questions about the cost-benefit of the drone program.

Flight time rose to approximately 12,000 hours. Yet the roughly 5,000 recent hours (since July 2010) of drone surveillance contributed, according to CBP’s own reporting, to only 325 new apprehensions and 7,000 pounds of marijuana.

To give some perspective on the drug haul attributed to UAV surveillance, in Arizona alone CBP seizes on average 3,500 pounds of marijuana every day – making a marijuana seizure every 1.7 hours. In the past couple of years the Border Patrol has seized approximately 2.5 million pounds of marijuana along the southwestern border.

CBP/OAM hails its “eyes in the sky” drone program has being “cost effective” and a “force multiplier.”
Setting aside the up-front costs of the $20 million drones and the additional maintenance expenses and contractor services fees, and counting only the hourly operational costs, CPB/OAM has spent $17.5 million keeping its drones flying about 5,000 hours over the past year and a half.

In an October media release announcing the acquisition of another Predator for border-security duty in Texas, CBP declared that it “has continued to leverage the Predator B to unprecedented success.”
CBP routinely describes its various border security operations as “unprecedented” success stories. Yet the never agency never cites the precedents involved or even attempts to explain how these precedents in border control have been surpassed by its new initiatives and spending.

If evaluated, as none of the DHS agencies do, in terms of costs and benefits, then the CBP UAV program spent (only in flight costs) $54,846 for every illegal immigrant identified (and later apprehended by Border Patrol teams) on the drone cameras and $2,500 for every pound of marijuana. That’s without factoring in the estimated $20 million that DHS spends for its Predators.

CBP Explains the Numbers Game

The Predators are called out when ground sensors signal movement. But as OAM’s Major General Michael Kostelnik explained at the July 15, 2010 Border and Marine Security subcommittee hearing:
At a standard 15 sensor activations, 12 of them might just be the wind. Two might be animals. One might be a group of migrants, and one might be a big group carrying drugs.

If there is a plausible explanation as to why there has been no increase in the number of drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions despite a jump from 10,000 to 12,000 hours of drone flights, it may be, as CBP wrote in response to the request to clarify its numbers, that:

"UAS is not exclusive to the border security mission. CBP OAM leverages the Predator-B and Guardian UAS as a force multiplier during National Special Security Events and emergency and disaster response efforts, including those of the U.S. Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, USCG, and other Department of Homeland Security partners."

In other words, the border Predators haven’t been on the border but have been deployed elsewhere on homeland security missions.

The Larger Threat Picture

Asked at Border and Marine Security subcommittee hearing if the Predators were worth the expense, Major General (Ret.) Kostelnik redirected the question away from actual achievements to the larger threat picture of protecting the homeland against unknown future threats. Kostelnik told the congressional oversight committee:

“I think the UAVs in their current deployment are very helpful in terms of the missions we apply it for. I believe we are building a force for a threat and an experience we really haven't seen yet. It is something that is in the future.”

Major General Kostelnik summarized his support for DHS strategy to deploy two dozen drones, telling the oversight committee: “So not only are they ongoing force multipliers for the agents and troops on the ground, but they are unique capabilities in unique circumstances.”

DHS does not measure the progress and achievements of the program by the number of terrorists seized, drug lords and lieutenants captured, or “transnational criminal organizations” broken by its border security operations.

Instead, border security programs -- whether traditional patrolling, the border fence, the “virtual wall” of SBInet, traditional air surveillance, or unmanned aerial surveillance -- continue to be measured by traditional border-control benchmarks: how many immigrants are captured and how many pounds of illegal drugs are seized.

It is a costly numbers game that has done little or nothing to resolve the country’s immigration policy challenges or the failures of its drug control policy.

******

The Fantasy of the “Fantastic Technology”
of Drone Border Security

(Excerpted from article published by Truthout, online at:
http://www.truth-out.org/fantastic-drone-technology-comes-rescue-border/1327519604

Candice Miller, the Republican chair of the House Border and Marine Security Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee, is effusive in her praise of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), referring to the drones at a March 15, 2011, hearing on Capitol Hill as "fantastic technology" that have proved "incredibly, incredibly successful in theater."

As the new chair of the subcommittee that oversees the air operations of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Miller has become one of the leading Congressional advocates of increased domestic drone deployment. Miller is a member of the House Unmanned Systems Caucus, which works to increase drone use and open US airspace to UAVs.

Since the inclusion in 2003 of immigration and border security agencies within the DHS, CBP has increasingly adopted a military lexicon to describe its operations. That makes sense since, for the first time, CBP had an explicit security mission - as evident in the wholesale adoption of the term "border security."

Over the past six years, CBP has spent more than $2 billion to create a "technological pillar" for border security. The other two border security pillars are personnel (Border Patrol and CBP agents) and infrastructure (mainly the border fence).

The two main components of CBP's new technological border security are the "virtual fence" project (first known as SBInet and now called the Alternative Technology Plan) and UAVs. In both cases, one from the ground and the other from the air, surveillance technology monitors stretches of the border and intelligence analysts attempt to determine if the received data includes evidence of illegal border crossings.

In both cases, CBP promotes these high-tech surveillance programs as "force multipliers." That's a Department of Defense term meaning a "capability that, when added to and employed by a combat force, significantly increases the combat potential of that force and thus enhances the probability of successful mission accomplishment."

The claim, then, is that UAVs increase the capability of the Border Patrol by increasing the effective scope of their patrols. The ostensible logic of the force-multiplying effect of UAVs is persuasive, just as the CBP assertion that the virtual fence functions as a force multiplier has been presented as common sense - that technology enhances productivity.

One problem with the force-multiplier argument for border drone deployment is that DHS has never provided any data to support the assertion. The other main problem is that DHS probably cannot supply this supporting data because it is simply not true. UAVs might be better described as being manpower-intensive rather than force multipliers. At any time, it is more likely that CBP drones are sitting on US military bases along the border rather than serving as the Border Patrol's "eyes in the skies."

Why is that? Numerous reasons. Bad weather, including cloudy conditions and winds, is a common explanation. Another is that CBP and its Office of Air and Marine (OAM) lacks the personnel to operate the drones.

Attempting to explain why it is so challenging to get drones in the air, General Kostelnik, who as OAM chief directs CBP's drone program, expressed his frustration with preconceived notions about the unmanned character of UAVs:

"We're not flying to the full potential, not because of aircraft or airspace limitations, but because we're still building the force. We're still growing the crews....

We are all here talking about unmanned. The real issues have nothing to do with the unmanned part. The real issues are all about the manned piece, and this is a manpower-intensive system."

The manpower-intensive character of UAVs, observed Kostelnik, is especially true for "the remotely piloted ones like the Predator." As the retired general explained, the Predators require two pilots for any one mission, but also large teams to handle launching and grounding. The manpower crunch obstructing more Predator patrols is also due to all the analysts required to do the "intel kind of things" with the steady stream of images transmitted by the drones.