Slashdot Mirror
DHS's Ongoing Drone Boondoggle (defenseone.com)
schwit1 writes: Spoofing is far from the only problem facing Department of Homeland Security and the way it gets drones to the border. In addition to giving grants to law enforcement agencies to purchase UAVs, DHS also has many of its own. Last year, the department's own inspector general declared that DHS drone purchasing program, which had spent $360 million since 2005 — $62 million in 2013 alone — was largely a failure. DHS had taken delivery of 11 MQ-9 Reaper drones, unarmed but otherwise similar to the ones used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS anticipated that the cost per flight hour would be $2,468, far lower than the actual $12,225. The agency was using accounting tricks to move the costs of pilots, equipment, and overhead off the books. Even the actual flights hours — 5,102 — were a fraction of the promised 23,296.
Wait, are you telling me the government lied? What? That's shocking!
That person is destroying, not securing the homeland. That person should be in jail.
Wouldn't something like a relatively peaceful border between two nations that are nominally at-peace, be a lot more cost-effectively administered by slow moving airships, with only a handful of rapid-response aircraft used solely for interdiction purposes?
Obviously no single technology is going to work to secure a border as long as the US-Mexico frontier, but it seems like the concept of using powered flight is somewhat misapplied here, especially if the costs are somehow as high as the article implies.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would be happy to save Uncle Sam 10% of that, and get plenty of seat time in my log book.
I'm sure a lot of other private pilots would be glad to do the same.
Which airstrip shall we report to?
I can't help but notice that the ratio of expected flight hours to actual flight hours is amazingly close to the ratio of actual flight cost per hour to expected flight cost per hour. In other words, if DHS put in the effort to get the drones up in the air as much as they said they would, the actual cost per flight hour would have been significantly closer to the expected cost?
Republicrats or Democans. It doesn't matter. Either will justify blowing untold billions[trillions] of dollars on drones, domestic surveillance, military intervention in foreign countries to blow up brown people of the month, and countless other avenues that only serve the military contractors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_contractors
...is more expensive than neither.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
What have the Xenos done for us lately?
The big advantages of a drone are 1) The pilot can live anywhere in the world. 2) It doesn't matter if the pilot gets shot down. 3) the drone can be made real small.
1) and 2) are really useful, if conducting operations over hostile Afghanistan. On the US-Mexico border, they are worthless. 3), why are the using the 2 ton mq-9?
A static barrier, with video cameras, might be the best option. Congress has been blocking that option for the last 15 years.
Xenos took my jerb!
Conservatism + Xenophobia is more expensive to the American taxpayer than outright socialism.
How are you measuring that - by the actions of the liberal administration that's actually running the programs in question?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The agency was using accounting tricks to move the costs of pilots, equipment, and overhead off the books. Even the actual flights hours — 5,102 — were a fraction of the promised 23,296.
Let me get this straight, DHS is cooking their books to hide expenses. So who is going to prison, isn't this fraud committed against the American taxpayer?
Congress is controlled by the republicans. They make the laws and they control all the money. The president is mostly a figurehead and the scam called "DHS" was erected under a republican administration.
You do know which party the current sitting President is from, right, you Bernie taintslurper?
Wow, it must be awesome to have actually taken the 30 seconds out of your life to register for a free account here. Tell us more about your amazing achievements!
Congress is controlled by the republicans
Right, you get a gold star for that one part. But it's strange that you don't understand that the DHS is controlled by the executive branch of the government. Their procurement process, the day-to-day decision making that covers policy and procedure matters (as it relates to things like how to actually go about putting drones to work along the border and how the details of that program are actually handled) are under the supervision of Obama's political appointees. Period.
It's funny that you blame a "republican administration" for being present when the DHS was established (such POWER the administration has, right?), but now that a different administration has been in charge of it for 7 years, you consider the executive branch to have no such power.
Oh, I get it. You're trolling. Never mind.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Bush does something: "Bush is the Devil. He will start WW3. He wastes all our money on pointless wars."
Obama does the exact same thing: "It's all the fault of Congress. The President is just a figurehead."
Didn't they supply Apple with the GUI?
Table-ized A.I.
Wouldn't something like a relatively peaceful border between two nations that are nominally at-peace, be a lot more cost-effectively administered by slow moving airships, with only a handful of rapid-response aircraft used solely for interdiction purposes?
My first job after graduating college was working as a programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't want to name. I'm not forbidden to name it and I have a lot of respect for the men and women who are in it, but man, I saw a lot of dumb technology moves while I was there, which is why I'm being charitable in not naming them. Basically what happens is that some branch of the government, in this case DHS, gets some money and says "Wow! Drones are cool! Let's buy a bunch!" because some manager type (in the US military, this may be a high ranking officer not a civilian) gets a hard on for some new technology. Nobody ever stops to think if it's actually practical or makes sense or is economically reasonable. We saw a lot of wasted money thrown in the trash when I worked on that government job and we weren't really happy about it, but the whole system is setup in such a way that there's no real way to stop this kind of purchase. It's not just another "DHS is the suxor!" kind of thing as Slashdotters want to think. Any part of the US government could have done the same dumb pointless thing.
$12,225/hr * 5,102 hrs = $62.4 million, which is exactly the 2013 budget for this program. 23,296 hours over 11 drones over one year is 24% flight time per drone which sounds like a pretty reasonable expectation. Over 8 years ramped up (constant rate of drone purchases throughout the period), it would be only 6% flight time, which seems highly unlikely. If they bought the drones all at once at the start of the program, it would be 3% expected flight time, which if true you'd be questioning why the program was even approved in the first place. So most likely those hour figures are for 2013 only.
If you take $12,225/hr of fixed costs, and distribute them over 23,296 hrs instead of 5,102 hrs, you get $12225*5102/23296 = $2,677/hr. Only 8% more than the anticipated $2,468/hr.
So basically, the program has cost only 8% more than what they estimated it would cost. They've just been able to keep the drones aloft for a lot fewer hours than expected (cost of pilots being traded off for cost of maintenance crew). The reporter, trying to exaggerate things to make his story sound bigger than it really is, then converted that overall cost into cost per flight hour and compared on that basis since it showed the biggest cost overrun.
Quick rule of thumb. Cost (dollars) is an amount. $/hr is a rate (first derivative of the amount). If you see an article claiming something about an amount (cost overrun), but then shows comparisons of a rate, that's a big red flag. Something deceptive may be going on, and you should do some number checking to figure out what the real story is.
Nobody likes the Xenos.
In fairness to the GP, the CIA and some of these agencies have completely ignored their orders and done as they've pleased. Many of us aren't convinced that who holds the oval office has a damned thing to do with what the TLAs are actually doing.
The CIA has spied on Congress, and blatantly broken domestic spying laws.
You think they give a fuck about what they're told to do? Or do you think they just go ahead and do it anyway?
The DHS and every other one of these agencies isn't above lying and breaking the law if it suits their needs. And that has nothing to do with who runs the executive branch any more.
What they have now is a bunch of agencies who don't really much care what the law is, or what the people overseeing them tell them to do. They're protecting their own interests and their own budgets and their own asses as much as anything.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A friend who is an amateur pilot pointed this out to me a few years ago: There is a huge surplus of cheap pilot labor because passenger airline pilot jobs require a minimum of 1,200 hours of flight time for certification. All of those would-be passenger airline pilots are trying to accumulate that much flying time on someone else's dime, meaning any flying job where the pilot does not pay for his own aircraft, maintenance and fuel.
Military drones are super expensive and have different requirements than are needed for border patrol, requirements such as long loiter times, capability for long-range missions, extreme stealth to evade sophisticated radar , offensive capabilities, high fuel efficiency, etc. Any conventional aircraft would be just fine for the job of border patrol. If DHS hired pilots to fly conventional aircraft retrofitted with cameras instead of purchasing and maintaining state-of-the art military drones they would save an enormous amount, get far greater coverage, and help out all those pilots looking for flight hours.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The rules and procedures that the DHS operates under was created 100% by the Bush administration. There is little to no way in hell that the culture and mindset of a government agency can be changed after its initial charter is established.
Oh, I get it. You're trolling. Never mind.
But it's strange that you don't understand that the DHS is controlled by the executive branch of the government.
Within the limits of the law, and you did acknowledge that the law establishing the DHS was written by Republicans, yes? The executive branch of the government has essentially no discretion about where money is spent. The law says "thou shalt buy drones" and so they do. They have to. Congress said so, so therefore it is done. It doesn't matter what party affiliation the titular head of the administration has. The executive branch follows the law.
Now we all know that the executive branch has ways of making itself felt, especially foot-dragging as a tactic, but we also know the fix is in for the DHS, good and fucking hard. They get what they want, when they want, because the military-industrial complex is the best politically connected industry in the country. You think the little parenthetical letter after the president's name matters a damn when it comes to DHS spending? Don't make me laugh.
The rules and procedures that the DHS operates under was created 100% by the Bush administration.
So you think that an agency's charter, written a decade ago, is forcing current political appointees and their staff to do bad math on the cost of running a particular program? Please point out where in the DHS charter you can spot Bush's influence over the current administration's choice of DHS leadership as they incorrectly estimate the running cost of an airborne border observation system. Please, be specific. Or admit that you've got nothing in the way of defending the current administration's incompetence, and so you're resorting to "it's all Bush's fault!" like the mindless useful idiot you are.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What liberal administration? Obama? He is no liberal.
You're 'effing looney! Cost per year is also a rate. When a DHS audit reports that OpEx was $62.4M/yr to complete less than 1/4 of the work/yr that the program was anticipated to do, you cannot simply dismiss the fact through amount-versus-rate mumbo jumbo. When the program office reports that its OpEx was only $12M/yr while asking to double the size of its fleet, whether you characterize those figures as amounts or rates, that's a big red flag.
First item: the cost per flight hour was not calculated by a reporter. It was calculated by the DHS Office of Inspector General, which is perfectly capable of calculating an OpEx. And yes, the period is only FY2013.
Second, you cannot treat OpEx as a fixed cost, spread that OpEx over an anticipated time of operation, compare that to a boondoggled OpEx spread over a much shorter actual time of operation, and declare "the program has cost only 8% more than what they estimated it would cost." If your security service only covered 1/4 of its shifts with its personnel budget, and dropped the other 3/4 for lack of funds, you're not going to congratulate them for staying within budget. And that was not an estimate of what it would cost -- it was a post-hoc analysis of cost that was presumably used in their push for expansion of the program.
Your comment proves that you can lead a horse to an OIG report, but you apparently can't make him read it (hint: it was the very first link). The breakdown of the respective calculations appears on page 8. In short:
OIG calculation: (Maintenance, Satellite Link, Fuel, Sensor Operations, Operational Support, Engineering Services, Base Overhead, and Depreciation @ $45,399,538 + Personnel @ $17,125,546) / 5102 flight hrs = $12,225/flight hr
program calculation: (Maintenance, Satellite Link, and Fuel @ $12,043,508 + Sensor Operations, Operational Support, Engineering Services, Base Overhead, and Depreciation @ $0 + Personnel @ $0 ) / 4880 flight hrs = $2,468/flight hr
In my checking, the best point of all was found on page 5 under the heading "UAS Flight Hours":
Double the size of my drone fleet! Because I already am flying 80% below my own anticipated capacity due to budget constraints. Nevermind that my actual operating costs are also almost 4x higher than what I'm telling you. We can fix that in post.
What liberal administration? Obama? He is no liberal.
I'm always amused by liberals who go out of their way to disassociate themselves from liberals who successfully make it into prominent public positions. Being a liberal is only fun if nobody is paying attention to what you actually DO (because then you have to explain why it doesn't work in the real world).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
DHS is using MQ-9's, which are made for 3DHV-MA-ISR-ME (Dull, Dusty, Dangerous, High Value, Medium Altitude, Intelligence-Strike-Recon, Medium Endurance) missions. For their size and weight, MQ-9's are the most expensive solution to problem.
Everything that the DHS can imagine using their drones for (excluding dreaming of lobbing Hellfires into drug-trucks) could be done with much lower cost hardware (practically hobbyist scale)
How long until mexcian drug cartells manage to capture a drone and repurpose it for their own drug delivery. Like in the movie Intersteallar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... :-)
Who used delivery drones first? Amazon? UPS? No, it's the drug dealers
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
The CIA has spied on Congress, and blatantly broken domestic spying laws.
Let's see, you're referring to the CIA under the supervision of Obama's appointed director, right?
If you don't like the Obama people in charge of places like DHS and IRS plainly lying to Congress when asked questions, why aren't you calling for a special prosecutor, knowing that Obama's DoJ is willfully avoiding holding them accountable for demonstrably criminal behavior?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...demand the money back from the ones in charge or let the ones in charge go and cut funding to DHS by that amount.