For most Americans, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s inaugural “state of US domestic security” speech yesterday will be notable mainly for marking the end of the useless “color code” threat system. But such trifling changes can never make up for the simple fact that her department — despite its 200,000 employees and yearly budget of $56 billion — isn’t up to its task.
Just consider our most urgent security challenge: the Mexican drug cartels.
By our government’s own estimates, the cartels are a deadly multinational conglomerate already present in at least 200 US cities. They’ve been at war with each other and with their own government for over four years, with no end in sight — and 30,000 lives lost so far.
They brazenly defend their interests on US soil — sometimes with sophisticated military technologies, sometimes with ancient technologies like the huge catapult captured south of the border yesterday. The Texas Rangers are now using armed helicopters against the cartels — while DHS’ Border Patrol choppers are engaged in pointless “catch-and-release” missions against illegal immigrants.
Indeed, DHS efforts to secure our southern flank have failed miserably: In October, the department admitted that more than 1,000 miles of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border were not under “effective federal control.” Just after Thanksgiving, a 2,200-foot cross-border tunnel was discovered in San Diego, complete with lighting and ventilation — and even a rail system.
The problem isn’t just limited to the cartels: Al Qaeda openly boasts of using drug tunnels to smuggle weapons of mass destruction through our porous defenses. Fortunately, those boasts have proven empty — at least so far.
To improve things, DHS tried to build a high-tech “virtual” border fence covering only a fraction of the border. The effort was recently canceled after wasting a billion taxpayer dollars.
The department seems uninterested in cost-effective solutions. For example, it’s investing hundreds of millions to adapt the Predator UAV for border surveillance. Howard Whetzel, a retired US Army officer, developed a lower-tech alternative: Sentinel, a commercially produced, powered glider (with state-of-the-art sensors) that could perform Predator missions at a fraction of the cost. (Full disclosure: Whetzel is Allard’s occasional business partner.)
Ten of the Sentinel gliders could provide stealthy surveillance of the entire border, for roughly $10 million — while DHS wants 23 Predators to do that job, at a cost of at least $200 million over five years. Although Sentinel could be fully operational in 18 months, DHS won’t even consider the idea.
The department’s problems have nothing to do with which party is in power. Back in 2007, it admitted having made little headway in solving the communications “inter-operability” problems that plagued police and firefighters on 9/11. Yet it continues to waste millions on expensive, top-down, technical “solutions” to deeply embedded organizational and cultural problems.
DHS’ own audit recently found that the process of providing intelligence reports to local police “fusion centers” is so slow that the information is largely worthless when it arrives. The main culprit: “the lengthy DHS headquarters review process.”
Congress created DHS after 9/11 out of 22 different federal agencies — without taking much care to see if the new creature would actually work. History shows this is no easy task. The modern Defense Department, created in 1947, needed three major shakeups over the next 40 years, until the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols reforms finally ended controversies that had simmered for over 40 years. Among the principal benefits: tighter partnership between the armed services — and quantum leaps in information-sharing and communications interoperability.
Congress needs to see if those same lessons can apply to DHS. Just as it does elsewhere in the national security establishment, Congress should scrutinize DHS to determine what works, what does not — and what must be changed to ensure our survival.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee hosts a Fox News Channel show. Kenneth Allard is a former Army colonel and an NBC News military analyst directly in volved in several Pentagon reforms, includ ing the Goldwater-Nichols Act.