DHS's Ongoing Drone Boondoggle (defenseone.com) 77
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 ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Stating the obvious? Yes, but not a mod option.
That's not how the moderation system is normally used. If you agree with a post, give it a +1. If you disagree with a post, give it a -1. The category does not matter.
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No! My comment should be modded off-topic!
(That's a present for my stalker. I *am* the master of digression and off-topic.)
No, I have no idea how I have maxed out my karma. I just assume you're all drunk. Oh, today they told me that I'm a conservative. (I mean, if I'm gonna be this far off-topic then I'm gonna earn that negative karma.) Heh, what good is karma if you don't spend it?
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they only lied as much as you wanted them to :)
but in the mean time some one got to play with reaper drones and boy was that fun.
Re: Wait, are you telling me ... (Score:1)
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Think of it this way... Now, you're getting a "free" rub-down every time you fly. The best part is it's not even truly free but someone else is paying for it!
Here's what you do... The next time they pat you down, close your eyes half way, let your jaw drop open, and moan a loud moan of delight.
Oddly, that ties in with a post earlier today. Yes, yes I have patted down detainees and yes, yes they were Marines. I can tell you, without a doubt, you'll leave a lasting impression on the person who did your pat se
Who runs DHS? (Score:3, Insightful)
That person is destroying, not securing the homeland. That person should be in jail.
Lighter than air craft? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The government versions of those $3 million blimps cost $45 million each. Before cost overruns.
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Have these people never heard of a Cessna?
You can find plenty of pilots who would jump at the chance to get hours in.
Re:Lighter than air craft? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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utterly failing to do their basic mission except by sheer accident
Hasn't their basic mission been to funnel money to defense contractors? Isn't that why the agency was created? By that measure, it seems like they are doing fine. If their mission really is to provide a service to the general public, then yes, they are failing horribly and wasting a lot of money.
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You don't actually know that any of your assertions is true, only that you are free to claim anything you want.
I don't know how they estimated cost per flight hour either before the program started or after. The actual costs
of fuel and pilot time are far less. Based on my 40 years of flying and aircraft ownership, I guess $500-600 per hour
for both. Most likely a change in accounting assumptions in the depreciation and in what
the agency decides to escrow for maintenance costs. Not lying. I'll bet you nev
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Bullshit.
Do you know what the title of the linked PDF is:
I may be paraphrasing, but I'm sticking with inept clowns, failing to achieve desired outcomes, and failing to account for the program as they are expected to.
Re:Lighter than air craft? (Score:4, Funny)
The report boiled down to: overpriced, improperly accounted for, and failing to demonstrate value for money spent.
Sounds like my ex.
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She was reporting on you.
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Actually, the most likely difference is in the number of drones that a single pilot is able to successfully manage versus the projected number. The thing about military drones is that they're designed to be mostly autonomous, with only periodic intervention whenever action is needed (e.g. shooting someone, examining images to determine whether someone is doing something that the
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"the most likely difference is in the number of drones that a single pilot is able to successfully manage versus the projected number"
On an aircraft the size of a MQ9, the wages of the pilot(s) are a minor part of the entire cost, whether that pilot is handling 1 or 4 aircraft is neither here nor there (other than the one-off cost of the piloting station)
The fact is it's a _large_ airframe powered by a turboprop, which automatically means high fuel consumption and high periodic maintenance costs on the gas-
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You're right, but that's not how the govt works (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Any part of the US government could have done the same dumb pointless thing.
and DHS excels at spending lots of money on these dumb pointless things.
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Drones could even be useful where the air currents or weather do not readily let lighter-than-air craft operate, or where population
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"Thing is, I could see drones having an application here. Set up a drone operation per so many hundred miles of border"
Border patrol is cheaper, less likely to make mistakes and given the ground is friendly, there's nothing preventing you running sensors along the border to do this. Aircraft are not needed, except to interdict airborne smuggling operations and history has shown that the most extensive of those were actually operated by the CIA (virtually the entire USA crack epidemic was fuelled by CIA carr
$12k / Hour? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure a lot of other private pilots would be glad to do the same.
Which airstrip shall we report to?
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You just might be on to something here. A chance for any average American to be patriotic, save our country (we won't go much into that) and get high caliber drone experience that could later be translated into blowing other people up. After all, we do need more drone pilots - the military is really hurting for qualified people.
I think you've stumbled on to a great idea here.
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Why do you need highly expensive drones, when you can have a C172 every 100 miles along the lines you need them for 10% of the cost?
Bavaria is doing that to do fire surveys during high-risk times. The government is paying for the operation hours of C172s, P28A, and similar. Pilots are volunteers.
Re:$12k / Hour? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wont work. Civilians can't be told to unsee things as well.
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...is more expensive than neither.
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Didn't they supply Apple with the GUI?
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Nobody likes the Xenos [wikia.com].
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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?
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Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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?
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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 incompet
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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 ma
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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).
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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.
We already tried that already [corpwatch.org]. Didn't work out all that well. Different idea, same contractors. Interesting, huh?
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2) It doesn't matter if the pilot gets shot down.
It would be a pretty impressive achievement to shoot down a drone pilot.
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2) It doesn't matter if the pilot gets shot down.
It would be a pretty impressive achievement to shoot down a drone pilot.
women in the nearby bars do that all the time
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"who is going to prison"
just the taxpayers who cook their books to not pay taxes
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Unless they are wealthy, or corporations, or politicians. Those people all do it and get away with it.
It's the little guy like you and I who goes to prison for such things. That bank account in the Caymans? Well, we'll pretend that never happened.
By the time you're a CEO it's almost expected. The politicians, mostly being former CEOs, all do it as well I bet.
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They'll be let off because they didn't understand the value of money due to an advanced case of affluenza. Being allowed to spend $36 million a year for a decade will do that to you.
This isn't quite so dramatic as TFA makes it sound (Score:4, Interesting)
$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.
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If DHS were not idiots... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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Seventeen. Million. Dollars. That. Is. Insane. There are companies producing large civilian drones that cost orders of magnitude less.
A drone should cost much less than a piloted aircraft. Since it doesn't have to carry a pilot, in can be much smaller and lighter. Fuel permitting, it can stay aloft longer, as you c
reminds me of Interstellar: capturing a drone (Score:2)
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?... [youtube.com] :-)
Who used delivery drones first? Amazon? UPS? No, it's the drug dealers
Either.... (Score:1)