Off-the-shelf tech 'empowers' Texas Sheriffs

Drug wars make local lawmen combatants

Austin – In an office building located somewhere in this capitol city, a close-knit group of intelligence officers headed by the Texas Rangers fights a border war with serious consquences.

It's called the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC).

This is a hot war, one fought against guns and bombs, bullets and knives, with GPS systems, deer cameras, pressure sensors - and cell phones.

Sheriff's departments are the key to the struggle, according to two of the nation's top military strategists.

Narcotics cartels do much more than smuggle drugs across the border. They also traffic in human sex slaves, launder money, recruit high school-aged children as gun-toting soldiers, and carry out terror operations against farmers and ranchers.

Every day, illegal immigrants looking for work in agricultural fields or in industrial settings are co-opted by terror soldiers trained by the likes of Mexican Army Special Ops deserters such as the Zetas Cartel.

They are interrogated; their origins in the interior of Mexico are learned, their close relatives identified. At that point, they are enslaved, made to tend to crops of marijuana, to mule loads of illicit narcotics or duffel bags of money returning to Mexico – or else their parents, kids, brothers and sisters will perish by the sword in their home villages.

To do all this, the cartels have sought to obtain a border “cushion” a “sanitary zone” of impunity from the Mexican law – one county in depth - on the Texas side of the international border.

That's why Texas Agriculture Commissioner Tod Staples commissioned two veteran Major Generals of the U.S. Army, Barry McCafrey and Robert H. Scales, to study the best methods and management techniques to help secure the Texas-Mexican border.

In a 59-page report released last September by their organization, COLGEN, the generals came up with some top advice that dovetails with the state's best efforts to stem the tide of unwanted crime and drugs along the nation's longest and loneliest line of demarcation, The Rio Grande.

A former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, Gen. Scales likened the operation to a tripartite problem in the realities of combat learned in the Persian Gulf region in two recent wars.

Operational integrity depends on flexibility and a high degree of mobility.

“The idea that a single point defense could interdict persons crossing the border violates a tenet of war; narrow, single point defenses are both porous and brittle, and can eaily be defeated by an intruder that manages to 'break through' by piercing a single defensive line and moving very quickly into the undefended areas deeper in the state and beyond.”

They found that the Texas Department of Public Safety uses a layered “defense in depth” at the tactical and operational levels,” an approach that “seeks to extend interdiction beginning with a low-cost interconneted set of sensors that extends from the banks of the Rio Gande inward through the entire depth of the southwestern border counties.”

Since the Secure Border Initiative failed miserably with the objections of the Government Accounting Office's recommendations after the expenditure of a little more than $1 billion in a contract with Boeing using radar and audio-visual technologies developed by home-grown Waco vendor Azbell Electronics, the department is using off-the-shelf devices, some of them as simple as deer cameras and ground pressure sensors strung out along key crossing points.

These points are linked to regional command and control facilities with GPS and cell phones.

The key: Proliferation and tactical depth is gained “at the sacrifice of sophistication.”

Tactical emphasis on security systems recognizes that “border sheriffs are overwhelmed by the threat of narco-terrorism...sheriffs are the close combat forces of the narco-war and it becomes a matter of first priority that sheriffs have all they need to achieve success.”

As always, the Rangers work very closely with the Sheriff's Departments to see to they are not overpowered.

The Rangers' tactical method includes the time-honored military adage that goes like this. “The enemy has a vote.”

Strategy is basic enough. Among senior leaders with the Texas DPS, the generals report, “They accede to the fact that much of their effort was derived from experience in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan...As with any military-style effort, strategic success is dependent on shared intent.”

What of the Secure Border Initiative? It's not over until it's over. It seems that the Nogales, Arizona, area has seen a new emphasis on electronic surveillance.

The Department of Homeland Security has begun soliciting contractors for a system of five border security towers it wants to put in place in Nogales, Ariz.

Customs and Border Protection intends to buy towers equipped with ground radars and surveillance cameras in Arizona. The basic idea is to remotely man the towers so that someone in a control room can watch a broad swath of border.

The program sounds a lot like the Strategic Border Initiative, the "virtual fence" government program that was deemed a failure and cost more than $1 billion before Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano scrapped it in 2011.

But Customs and Border Protection official Mark Borkowski says it’s a much less ambitious system.

"As we were building SBINet, we had industry and representatives of the Department of Defense coming to us and saying why are you doing that, why are you trying to create something that has all of those bells and whistles. The basic stuff you need is just cameras and radars," Borkowski said.

Borkowski says the contracts should be awarded by October.