The United States Air Force is going to be retiring the MQ-1 Predator drone from service by the end of 2018. This will bring an end to a long service for the drone for the past twenty years. The USAF plans to simply place them drones out in the boneyard and leave them there in a nonflyable storage, stripped of parts and rusting away.
Is this really the best idea? The drones have life time left in them, but they are obsolete as far as frontline service goes.
Some asked if the US Army should take the drones: the army doesn't want them. The Navy doesn't want them either: they are working on the far higher end UCLASS.
There is one more place these could end up: the Department of Homeland Security. I'm generally not much of a fan of the department, to be honest, but there are parts of it which are useful. The Coast Guard, for example. I do have a love-hate, emphasis on the latter, relationship with the Border Patrol. However, with all the stupid talk of building a wall between us and Mexico, and the failed attempt at the "smart border," I wondered if you could use those 141 drones to patrol the Mexican border.
The first problem is the fact the video feed of the Predator is like looking through a soda straw when you want to be looking at a wide area if you are going to be enforcing the border. because of this, the Predators and Reapers have not been that effective at patrolling the border.
There is a solution, but it will cost more money. That would be the ARGUS-IS pod designed for the Predator and Reaper drones. Without sacrificing the ability to zoom in to look at specific targets, the Predators would have an area of 100 square km (39 square miles, 6 1/4 miles on a side) it would be watching.
Secondly, with 141 drones, you (at most) can have one third of them in the air at a time. Minor maintenance and refueling will take out some and others will need major maintenance. This leaves us with 47 Predators in the air at a time max.
With the border 1989 miles long, roughly, each drone would be responsible for 43 miles. At any given moment, only 6.25 miles are being observed. However, the Predator cruises at roughly 90 mph. If you assume a circuit of 90 miles around (43 miles each way with a 1 mile overlap between the Predator tracks and a 1 mile turn, so to speak), then the Predator will sweep every half hour and be observing any particular spot for roughly 4 minutes.
25 or 26 minutes is pretty long if there is a car on road. However, for looking for people on foot, piece of cake. Likewise, if you consider, the evidence of places being used by cars or whatnot will also be observed. Even vehicles on rough terrain could be caught, actually.
This would mean the 9 Reapers DHS already has could be placed on the border for specific areas which might be of interest without interrupting the normal patrols. And the Reapers can be tasked for the Coast Guard, etc. when not on special tasking on the USA/USM border.
It seems doable. On the technical and operational side. However, this is really a money problem. The DHS would need to set up at airports along the border. Probably every hundred or two hundred miles. That's 10 to 20 airports. It also means procuring the 141 ARGUS-IS pods. it also means the data produced would need to be archived and then accessible for analysis. Each ARGUS produces over a petabyte per day. This means 47 PB per day 365 days per year: 17.6 exabytes for a year's worth of data which would need to be on disk. A five year period would need a massive tape library. It would also need a massive computer center for the analysis of that data. Plus the sudden surge in drone mechanics and pilots. And security. I am sure there are plenty of countries who'd be tempted to make off with an ARGUS pod and the border patrol is not the US Army....and the US Army has munitions swiped and stolen. I'd guess you'd have a billion dollar program to build up and then half that to run it.
You'd have your border fence though and it'd probably cause less environmental problems and cost less.
