A border solution.

Whether we have a border wall built or not, and it’s my opinion that we will likely never have one built, the US border with Mexico is going to require manpower and non-wall/fence infrastructure if our leaders are serious about securing it, which I believe they are not.

It’s my opinion, based on my time spent in Korea near the DMZ and Afghanistan in many Forward Operating Bases (FOB) and Combat Outposts (COP), that our border can and should be secured using military forces and FOBs. The border with Mexico is about 3,100km in length, and in my experience, a FOB with enough personnel and technology would be able to secure a 50-60km section of border.

When I was in Afghanistan, we used small blimps tethered to the ground for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). A single “Aerostat” with cameras, radars and laser rangefinders can monitor the ground on the border in a 30km radius. That’s 30km to the East and 30km to the West, 60 km. The same Aerostat can monitor the air with radar in a 200nm radius, giving a radar span of 400nm.

I believe that if we started with the idea that each installation could cover 50-60km, that would require 53 FOBs. If we acknowledge that some terrain is impossible to cross, we could get that number to 50 exactly. If we further acknowledge that some areas of the border are less often used for illegal activity, again perhaps due to terrain, some of those FOBs could be reduced to smaller COPs, therefore requiring lower levels of staffing. Additionally, some of the areas of the border are already heavily watched and monitored, and while I feel that security needs to be strongly increased in those areas, we would not need to build a FOB or COP in those areas. I’m talking about places like San Diego and El Paso.

I believe that it would be appropriate to line our border with anywhere from 35-40 installations, with most of those intstallations being FOBs and the rest being smaller COPs. The US has operated hundreds of installations in Afghanistan and hundreds more in Iraq for years and years. 35-40 of these are certainly doable to protect the border.

During my time in Afghanistan, I traveled to numerous FOBs and COPs, with most of those bases containing anywhere from 60-600 people. I am not including the super FOB airfields that contained several thousand troops and civilian personnel. If I was in charge, I would staff each FOB/COP with active duty US Army troops on 6 month “deployments”, with Army Reserve and National Guard troops rotating in for their monthly (or even annual two-week long exercise) training a few times per year. I would also staff the bases with varying amounts of personnel from the US Marines and Air Force, CBP, ICE, DEA, BATFE, FBI, NRO, US Marshals and FBI as needed for duties contained in their scope of authority and expertise. State, county and city LEOs would also be ordered and assigned to work closely with any FOB/COP in their jurisdiction.

Even if we staffed each base with around 600 people, that would only equal about 25,000 people (I rounded up by about a thousand) for these bases in addition to what is already on the border at the present time. Most of these personnel would be active duty military and new CBP officers.

This manpower is entirely feasible. The US currently has over 14,000 troops in Afghanistan. We have over 28,000 in South Korea (where I saw what REAL border security looks like). There are currently about 5,000 troops in Iraq, where ISIS no longer holds any territory at all. There are over 2,000 acknowledged US troops in Syria, and I would estimate that there could be as many as 2,500-3,000 in total. If we can manage hot zones like those, spare tens of thousands more in other locations like Germany, Italy and Japan and still maintain MOST of our forces inside the US, then we absolutely CAN afford that manpower for that. And don’t tell me we can’t afford to maintain those bases financially. We’ve been doing it for nearly two decades in multiple war zones. Just conjure up more digital money. That is now literally how the Western “capitalist” economy works, unfortunately.

Please note, I would not reduce or take away from any existing border security measures or personnel. This plan would be all ADDITIONAL personnel and infrastructure, and I would put it in place whether we build a wall or not.

Lastly, all technology required and useful for border security would be requisitioned. Drones for ISR and targeting, ground sensors where appropriate, JSTARS flyovers to detect cartel hardware, so on and so forth. If these assests have to be pulled from active combat zones or other overseas “contingency operations”, then so be it

If anyone is in regular contact with one Donald J. Trump, please pass this information along to him.