Posted on 09/30/2006 6:17:40 PM PDT by Pokey78
Security in Iraq has collapsed so dramatically that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour.
The huge project to build the barrier, which will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire, will snake across the vast and remote desert frontier between the countries.
The fence will be built despite the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Saudi kingdom has spent in the past two years to beef up patrols on its border with Iraq, with officials saying the crisis in Iraq is now so dangerous it must be physically shut out.
"Surveillance has already been stepped up over the past 18 months," said Nawaf Obaid, the director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an institute that advises the government on security affairs.
"But the feeling in Saudi is that Iraq is way out of control with no possibility of stability. The urgency now is to get that border sealed: physically sealed."
The fence is a fresh sign that key allies of the United States in the Middle East are resigned to worsening violence and the possible break-up of Iraq, where American intelligence agencies said this week that the continuing conflict fuelled global terrorism. The National Intelligence Estimate, a report compiled by 16 spy agencies, concluded that the Iraq war had become a cause célèbre for Islamic extremists and was cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement
For Saudi Arabia, whose nationals have been accused of playing a key role as foreign fighters in the Iraq insurgency, the deterioration in its northern neighbour is a security nightmare.
Saudi officials are worried about so-called "blowback", in which Saudi insurgents in Iraq bring jihad back to the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah. But they are mostly concerned that an Iraqi civil war will send a wave of refugees south, unsettling the kingdom's Shia minority in its oil-producing east.
"If and when Iraq fragments there's going to be a lot of people heading south and that is when we have to be prepared," said Mr Obaid.
For many years Saudi plans to improve security on the Iraqi border have been part of a vast multi-billion-pound air, sea and land-based project to protect the whole country, known as Miksa, or Ministry of Interior Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The scheme aims to ring the country with hundreds of radar facilities, coastal sonar detection bases, a telecommunications network and patrols by reconnaissance aircraft.
But the huge centralised project, which one defence contractor who works closely with the Saudi government valued at up to £13 billion, has been slow to get off the ground. Now the kingdom has decided that it cannot afford to wait for Miksa to stave off the threat of violence spilling over from Iraq. Contractors competing for the project will have to promise that they can complete the whole 550 miles of fence within a year.
"Everyone you speak to in Saudi Arabia says it is now desperately urgent," said Anthony Forester-Bennett, from Westminster International, a British company bidding to help build the fence. "They say there's a real danger of very nasty people coming across from Iraq."
Analysts said that even taking into account delays and disputes that usually accompany such valuable military contracts, the fence was on course to be finished by the early summer of 2008. The total cost is expected to reach at least £300 million,
Once complete it will revolutionise border security, where currently the best weapons in the fight against terrorists are 100 sniffer-dog teams who patrol the frontier.
Outwardly it will appear mundane, with two metal barriers running 100 yards apart, lined with barbed wire at the base and top. On the Iraqi side, alarms will notify patrols if an intruder attempts to scale or cut through the fence. Between the two fences will be yet more barbed wire, piled in a tall pyramid.
But its effectiveness will rely on its more sophisticated or hidden counter-measures. Under the baking sand will be buried sensor cables relaying a silent alarm to monitoring posts at regular intervals along the border. At the posts, face-recognition software will process pictures relayed from cameras, which will also be able to operate at night.
"The costs are not going to be about just building the fence but equipping it too," said Mr Obaid. Behind the line of the fence, command and control centres with heliports would provide bases for troops to respond to any alert.
For Saudi Arabia, terrorists and refugees from the conflict are not the only unwelcome intruders.
"We suffer badly from illegal immigration, as well as the smuggling of drugs, weapons and even prostitutes," said Mr Obaid. "It is becoming a major issue."
Despite the details emerging about the fence, Saudi Arabia's military is keeping some aspects under wraps. According to one source, the project is being kept so secret that military officials from Centcom, America's central command responsible for Iraq, have been told they cannot inspect the site on "national security" grounds.
Even spy satellites will not be able to unravel the fence's secrets. The source speculated that the reason for the secrecy might be automated weapons systems attached to the fence that could fire on suspected smugglers or intruders.
"It's being done in true Saudi style," the source said. "State-of-the-art equipment and no expense spared."
Well, shucks. I thought fences didn't work. The media slime here in the U.S. assure us that a fence won't do diddly if built on the Southern border. They also assure us that it won't work for Israel; I guess the past several years of vastly reduced raghead incursions is just a blip.
I don't know beans about the tech angle, but could it perhaps have something to do with the local environment? If the surroundings are often hotter than the human body's 98.7 fahr would it make more sense to work from the opposite end of the spectrum?
I remember once reading in a book about polar bear research that airborne IR equipment could not spot polar bears on the ice floes because their insulation was such that they didn't stand out thermally, so they used an ultraviolet based system that could pick out the different reflected wavelenth from the critter's fur.
Walls work pretty well, so long as the gate guards can't be bribed. At the least, prices of bribing the gate guards will go up.
The Italians cut off the Arab rebellion in Libya in the 1920s with a wire fence of significant depth along the Egyptian border. The fence was still a significant obstacle in desert battles in WWII.
Morocco did a good job against the Polisario in the 80s. with a sand berm and wire fence. The weakness of any border wall is the guards. "Qui custodiet ipso custodes." Who guards the Guards? is the old line. In a nation with a long tradition of corruption (and before you get too proud, remember Chicago, Louisiana, and the Big Dig in Boston), being a guard is a very very lucrative position.
IR in the desert is unreliable, at certain times of the day. The desert sand is hot in the afternoon, and cools off at night. The wide range gives you two windows of opportunity to cross.
Ultraviolet looks specifically for shadows from the UV reflected first from the sky, and second from the ground. Why is UV more effective than plan optical cameras? Any dope can make a camouflage outfit that matches the ground in the optical range. You have to know the specific frequencies of UV in the cameras to match the UV signature.
Of course shooting out the cameras would work a little bit, but cameras.
I hope we have a similar requirement for ours and that the project doesn't die after the November election.
I would rather they just keep their own damn people from going INTO Iraq, as they have by the hundreds, to become martyrs against Coalition forces.
It was supposed to be the end of totalitarianism, remember? A whole new world of freedom. The end of a cold era.
Nobody ever thought then the walls would be going up again.
It's an observation that takes a bit of poetic license to make its point.
Your explanation is good, and it sounds like you have direct knowledge of this approach. If you do, that would tend to settle it for me.
Two of the "standard" approaches to night vision video surveillance that seem likely to work (even in the hot desert) are:
The saudis are the biggest slave drivers in the world. They fly in all their slave labor and sex slave/house keepers from countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
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