A bit of a tangent, but how is the US/Mexico border a "defense" issue? The Mexican military is not planning an invasion. I am unaware of any Latin American terrorist groups threatening the USA.
I am not trying to be pedantic here, but words are important. If the US/Mexico border is a defense issue, then it should be entirely militarized?
Andruil would be most accurately described as a surveillance company, would it not?
Honestly, it's just a subtle misunderstanding due to how Anduril's product path blurs the lines between the products they sell now, and the structure of their company & goals long-term.
Long-term, Anduril wants to be a defense co. that bids for and wins contracts with the Department of Defense and challenges the monopolies of Lockheed Martin et al. To do this, they had to find an MVP that let them develop technology & make money in a way that could be leveraged toward that goal in the future.
Border security works well for this, because a lot of the software & hardware they will build here is dual-use for defense and border security. Furthermore, selling technology to the border patrol is probably the closest sales problem in the world to selling to the U.S. military - Same regulatory framework, sales cycle, Congressional lobbying landscape, even product review. It's a stepping stone to selling full-blown defense tech, hence the mish-mash of terms.
Yeah, surveillance is definitely the more accurate description, buy borders are always a defense issue. In this case the US has a vested interest in knowing who is coming into the country and making sure they are processed through official channels and catch incidents where that isn't happening. The idea that migrants and caravans are somehow massively harboring terrorists may be a bit of hysteria, but that doesn't mean there aren't still national security issues at stake on the border.
It's long, so here's the relevant part quoted at length:
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There’s an anthropologist friend of mine, a guy called Steve LeBlanc–he runs the Peabody Museum in Harvard–who wrote a book once called “Constant Battles” about pre-civilized human beings and how they actually lived. Not the fantasy version, where they lived in, you know, the Garden of Eden and wore flowers in their hair, but the real ancient world where food shortages, including ones that you could die from, were a regular occasion. And his rule of thumb is “people always raid before they starve.”
“Raid the neighbours.”
Now, it doesn’t automatically/inevitably follow that large civilized society will do the same as small hunter-gatherer bands, but it’s the same people, you know. So the military think that there’s going to be a lot of work for them. I mean I can’t discern, and I don’t see how you would separate their motives into the ‘good ones’–they just want to be ready to deal with trouble–and the ‘bad ones’–they’re looking for a justification for their existing budget and the present justifications are getting a bit thread-worn so we need some new ones…I can be quite cynical about this on occasion; but I have taken my pills today.
But they’re right. That–I mean, you talk to the US military for example, their, I’d say, obsession in the planning. I mean, not your average grunt or his, you know, the “2nd platoon officer” but in the thinking parts of the military: the obsession with Mexico. Because there’s a 2,000 mile/3,000 kilometers (I’m in Canada) 3,000 kilometer border between Mexico and the United States. There are a hundred million people in Mexico, another 50 million south of them in Central America; the farms there are going to dry up and blow away.
There’s already a well established pattern: when you’re in deep trouble and you can’t feed your family, head north. There is an existing arrangement on the US border which might be described as “catch some, let some go.” I mean it’s–it’s not really fortified. It looks pretty impressive in the cities where people can see it, but if you drive 10, 15 kilometres out of town east or west along the border, you’re down to three strands of barbed wire and a dirt patrol track with a vehicle down it every 4 hours. It is actually meant to allow lots of people to get through because cheap illegal labor is what keeps American agro-business profitable, and the reason that it’s cheap is because the workers are illegal and they can’t bargain. So there is a reason for all this–though not one we can speak of in front of the children. This provides a safety valve for Mexicans, the Mexican state. It provides cheap labor for American farmers and, you know, the flow is maybe half a million a year, a million a year, and half of them go home again after the harvest. We can deal with that–there’s 300 million people in the United States; drop in the bucket. But try 5 million a year, because things have fallen apart and there’s no food in Mexico.
What do you do at 5 million a year? Well, the US Army’s convinced that the Congress will tell them to close that border–really close it–and they can do that! It’s absolute nonsense–though you’ll hear it often enough in the States, they go: “Ooh, I dunno…2,000 miles of border; we could never shut that–”
Bullshit.
Iron Curtain! You remember the Iron Curtain?
But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you’re willing to kill people.
Admitting and training 5M new American people per year could be precisely the workforce solution the US needs in order to solve the looming long term care crisis we will have on our hands when the baby boomers transition from elderly to frail.
What if the first stop across the border wasn't a detention center but rather a LTC training facility?
Yes there is the language problem, but how many jobs in LTC require fluency?
Yes there is the fact that some places where the LTC crisis is hitting hard like New England and the rust belt are far away from the border, but perhaps families are desperate/poor enough to relocate? Aren't some retiring near the border for cost reasons (tax) already?
>>>A bit of a tangent, but how is the US/Mexico border a "defense" issue?
Border security is THE most basic, fundamental responsibility of national defense. The US has just spent so frickin' long with benign powers on its land borders, and so focused on global expeditionary operations, that its border security efforts have atrophied. That said, national defense is now an over-arching term that includes a mix of law enforcement and military responsibilities and tasks. Note that securing our airspace "borders" largely falls onto Combat Air Patrols conducted by the various state Air National Guards, typically flying F-16s or F-15s.
>>>I am unaware of any Latin American terrorist groups threatening the USA.
Maybe not Latin American ones, but Al Qaeda just called for renewed attacks on the US in the wake of the 9/11 anniversary.[1] We KNOW that illegal aliens are crossing into the US traveling from as far as west/central Africa. [2] West Africa already has an Islamic terrorism problem.[3] From a risk assessment/risk management perspective, it is wise to allocate resources to reduce the chance of AQ or ISIS agents sneaking across our southern border, which leaks like a sieve.
>>>If the US/Mexico border is a defense issue, then it should be entirely militarized?
I think most major countries handle it as a national-level law enforcement responsibility, but sometimes there are still significant military forces involved.
As a point of comparison, China uses Army forces for border security, in addition to other agencies.[4] Russia's primary border force is a law-enforcement organization.[5]
It's not corruption, it's basic resource allocation. Why would we want to dedicate equal amounts of manpower to both borders, when only one of them accounts for the overwhelming majority of unlawful crossings?
It's not a defense issue, it's a law enforcement issue. Which is why law enforcement agencies (ICE, CBP) are the ones enforcing laws against illegal entry. The military is generally only mobilized at the border when large groups are poised to cross the border in numbers large enough that ICE and CBP don't have the manpower to stop it.
Because there is significantly less illegal immigration coming from those borders. Responsible resource allocation involves employing your assets where they will net the greatest utility.
Let's say 1 Anduril Widget would stop 10 border crossings/year on the southern border, but only 1/yr on the Canadian border. If I have 100 widgets, allocating them all to the southern border is the objectively superior employment of my assets. Only if my marginal utility per widget drops to preventing <1 crossing per year in the SOUTH should I even CONSIDER shifting resources to the northern border.
Why does DoD care about illegal immigration? Mexico is not about to invade. This is useless to their mission.
If they are going to build it and hand it of to border patrol, then Congress should fund it with the border patrols budget. Which they won’t, because this is as useless as a physical wall. So funding it with the money taxpayers allocated for the DoD is the definition of corruption.
Those people are quite well accounted for, right (IIRC they take your photos and fingerprints when you cross the border, presumably also for visa application). Completely different from an illegal "new-immigrant" that crosses the border unnoticed.
No it’s not, the most basic responsibility of national defense is stopping invading armies.
Or maybe it’s dealing with the other nuclear powers.
Stopping people coming over the border to be residents is probably not in the top 10 of national defense priorities.
Honestly, as a matter of policy I don’t think it’s even something we are trying to do since immigration is so good for GDP, and nothing else really matters as much as growing GDP.
You would stop invading armies everywhere, at the border, inside the border, in their homeland and the lands of their allies, in the borders of your own allies, anywhere.
Do you imagine border patrol plays a key strategic role in war? What would be an example
of that from history?
>>>You would stop invading armies everywhere, at the border, inside the border, in their homeland and the lands of their allies, in the borders of your own allies, anywhere.
"Defend everywhere" makes for a very poor Commander's Intent or Mission Statement. If you are defending "inside the border"...you've already failed at stopping your adversary AT the border. It also violates almost half of the Principles of War (mass, objective, economy of force, simplicity). Reference Appendix B of [6].
>>>Do you imagine border patrol plays a key strategic role in war? What would be an example of that from history?
From[1]:
"Pakistani patrols began patrolling in territory controlled by India in January 1965, which was followed by attacks by both countries on each other's posts on 8 April 1965.[44][45] Initially involving border police from both nations, the disputed area soon witnessed intermittent skirmishes between the countries' armed forces."
Re: [2][3]These Soviet-Japanese border conflicts would have 2nd and 3rd order effects on military doctrine, development, and strategic focus (the Japanese stopped poking the Bear and focused on China). The Soviets gained some confidence in their operational doctrine and gained confidence fighting the Japanese (who they last fought against, and lost to, in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War).
Reference [4] describes how the Soviets managed border security during their Afghanistan war.
Reference [5] has a short section on "Border Security in Contemporary Counterinsurgency" to summarize border control issues from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. It particularly points out the significant political ramifications of cross-border insurgents and counter-insurgency operations.
As a Mexican I can only agree, and would love the US to have a hard solution to this problem which a wall could certainly help. People think migrants are the US's problem but no, sadly the real question is how can we make migrants thrive in their original places and why this is not the approach to take?
I completely agree that one approach to illegal immigration is understanding why illegal immigrants are coming to the US in the first place.
In my analysis the US "War on drugs" is a major reason. Illegal goods in high demand mean smuggling and black markets with lots of profits. These markets cause criminal cartels. The cartels corrupt government and law enforcement. Corruption and cartel activity lead to high crime areas and low economic opportunity. High crime and lack of opportunity leads to people wanting to leave.
The US also ended guest worker programs that made it easy for seasonal workers to work in the US and live in Mexico. Many people wanted to do this, so they could live in their homeland with their family, friends, and culture but also seasonally work in the US where they could earn more. By ending seasonal worker programs, the people who wanted to work in the US needed to do so illegally, and, in order to minimize the risk and hassle of repeat illegal border crossings, they made a single illegal crossing and lived and worked in the US with their families.
If I were President, I'd end the drug war and decriminalize virtually all drugs. I'd also reinstate guest worker programs and make it very easy to get temporary legal access to the country. I'd invest in technology and infrastructure at the US Mexico border so we could move people through, both ways, as fast as possible. I'd also be involved with Central and South American allies and work with them to mitigate problems that may be the root of illegal immigration.
I agree that the war on drugs is one component. However even before it (19th century Mexico) my country had structural issues leading to crime, inequality and corruption.
MS-13 was literally founded in the US, in Los Angeles. Their rise to prominence (from small street gang to transnational one) was under the control of a man named Ernesto Deras, who had been trained by US Army Green Berets in Panama while serving in the Salvadorean Special Forces, and then left El Salvador and moved to the US to escape the brutal civil war in El Salvador- a civil war the US did have some involvement in. But MS-13 (and their rivals the 18th Calle) started in the US and then emigrated back to El Salvador.
Nobody* deserves to be the subject of violence but at some point Americans need to take responsibility for creating (and continuing to create) the environment in which cartels can flourish.
When almost half the country can't even be bothered voting, much less stand up against crimes against humanity like forcibly and intentionally separating children from their parents (sometimes permanently) and locking them in cages, then frankly I think you lose the right to complain about the circumstances you find yourself in.
In other words, you can't take a shit on the kitchen counter and then complain about the smell.
Well, whether you agree with it or not, part of the justification is that if anybody can cross easily, terrorist groups will, too. IIRC, the 9/11 hijackers didn’t fly into the US since we were looking for them, they flew into Canada and crossed the border (although Canada’s not Mexico, of course…)
This is correct. There were attempts to cross over from Canada, like the Millennium plot, but they were stopped despite a notoriously porous border [0].
That might be because it’s way bigger than the wall we would need on the southern border or because more people cross from the south than from the north or because they actually are using border security as an excuse to keep out Mexicans - but keeping terrorists out is (one of) the justifications for classifying border security as a national security and therefore military issue.
> You don't hear a lot about the big wall we need across the Canadian border.
We don't have many people crossing the border illegally, at the canadian border.
Of course we are going to prioritize the location in which the vast majority of people who enter the border illegally, are using. Which is the southern border, in this case.
I am not trying to be pedantic here, but words are important. If the US/Mexico border is a defense issue, then it should be entirely militarized?
Andruil would be most accurately described as a surveillance company, would it not?