Border technology vendors face stringent acquisition regime.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

SASABE, Ariz.--The alleged smugglers jumped over the 10-foot high border fence near this sparsely populated border town just after the noon hour on a bright sunny day.

A suite of cameras and sensors perched on top of a tower a few miles away picked up their movements and began tracking them immediately.

As Border Patrol agents converged on their position, a Customs and Border Protection helicopter crew about to wrap up a sortie decided it had enough fuel left in the tank to help out. It wasn't long before it was hovering over the fence-jumpers and agents had them in custody.

They told the arresting agents that the marijuana bales found in the bushes a few feet away did not belong to them.

Key to the arrest and drug seizure was the radar that picked up the initial intrusion.

After years of preparation, CBP's acquisition department awarded in March a contract to Elbit Systems of America to build a third generation of fixed towers designed to monitor the border. Officials said they have learned from the mistakes of the past, which led to an acquisition strategy designed to avoid the pitfalls of the second-generation cameras.

Those cameras--strung out in a chain along two sections of the Arizona border--were initially part of the Secure Border Initiative and have since been renamed Block 1. They are still in use, and one of them helped spot the alleged Sasabe smugglers, who jumped the fence in broad daylight.

There is a perception on the south side of the fence that the sensors atop the towers are more effective at night, which is not true, said Joseph A. Korchrnaros, special operations supervisor of fixed technology at the Border Patrol's Tucson sector. Agents rely on the forward looking infrared radar sensors just as much in the daytime because they are better at picking up movement.

Korchmaros has been intimately involved with camera and sensor systems in Tucson since the SBI program kicked off in 2006.

The integrated fixed tower program is only one piece of a larger technology system called the Arizona surveillance technology plan. It includes remote video surveillance systems, which use day-night cameras for cluttered urban environments where radar is not as effective, and truck-mounted mobile systems that can be moved where needed. These three basic camera and sensor platforms grew out of lessons learned from the maligned SBInet program.

The most common word CBP Acquisition Executive Mark Borkowski used to describe these technologies at a recent industry conference is "non-developmental." 'The agency is asking vendors to come to it only with tried and tested products.

One problem with the SBInet, Korchmaros said, was that CBP asked one vendor, The Boeing Co., to do everything, including cameras, radars and integration.

"It was too much to ask one vendor to provide all that," he said.

The original vision was to have all...