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.

Comments

Wait, are you telling me ...

[Notorious G]

Wait, are you telling me the government lied? What? That's shocking!

Lighter than air craft?

[TWX]

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.

Re:Lighter than air craft?

[gstoddart]

The short version is they've lied, mismanaged funds, and taken steps to cover it up.

You're trying to come up with a sensible solution, which is utterly pointless when discussing a huge government agency spending like drunken monkeys and getting very little value for all that money.

The takeaway here is DHS get given huge sums of money on the claims they're making us safer ... when the reality is they are apparently incompetent, dishonest, and utterly failing to do their basic mission except by sheer accident.

That they're doing accounting tricks to hide this says they know damned well they're a bunch of clowns who are mis-spending money.

Why is nobody being charged with fraud?

Re:$12k / Hour?

[hoggoth]

Wont work. Civilians can't be told to unsee things as well.

If DHS were not idiots...

[Jodka]

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.