The wall and who is going to pay for it - this was great theater during the run up to the election. It got great press and had a really cool ring to it. But that's in the past, now is time for some reality.
Mr. President, would you give me the $1.8 billion to work on the problem? First, the boarder is 1,954 miles long. That would mean that you gave me $921,187 per mile to secure the boarder. This kind of jibes with what someone told me that the cost of a highway starts at about a million dollars per mile. And of course I am ignoring an important matter, and that would terrain. And that's why the estimates for a full wall are much more than the budget you gave me Mr. President. The definition of a wall is that no one can get over. A wall stops people and their belongings. So then before we talk about solutions, we should start at the problem. Then the budget to solve. The Border Patrol has more than 19,000 sworn agents but not all are assigned to the southern boarder. Let's just say 10,000 are. So that's 10,000 divided by 2,000 (1,954 rounded up) or 5 men for every mile. These men are already paid for. Envision a drone with the power to simple lift a couple of cameras, one normal, one perhaps heat sensitive or night vision capable. These cameras are capable of sending motion pictures to a control site. At the control site we have software that is analyzing the camera data for movement or any other indication that something nefarious might be happening. Drones would have the software capability to fly a mission, perhaps a few miles, and then go to a charging station and connect automatically. All common software/hardware capabilities. The drones would typically fly at an altitude that would allow for a nice range of view and sufficiently high to be silent from the ground. If we had 1,000 drones active at a given time, there would be a drone for every two miles. There patterns of flight and timing would make it difficult to anticipate when a drown would be watching any given point, but that point could expect to be in sight every minute or two. Drones would be able to leave their patrol pattern and follow border crossers until human patrols could get to a point for arresting border crossers. The drone software that would balance patrols and tracking operations for 1,000 units would be an achievable task for American coders. At these quantities, the drone described would cost about $1,000. 1,000 would be active at any time; 2,000 would be purchased for the fleet for 2,000,000. Charging units could be built for (make it easy) $1,000 each. One every two miles. 1,000 units plus 500 for maintenance rotation, 1,500 charging units purchased for $1,500,000. These purchases would be open market purchases based on RFP's. If SpaceX and the like are examples of American ingenuity, this is the obvious answer. So let's consider some overruns and budget the $3.5 million job a $10 million. This is a rounding error in even the current allotment for the wall. Let's do it!
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