I'm not an expert with the sensing equipment used in this sort of fencing, but "ultraviolet night-vision cameras" sound screwy.
There are a couple types of night vision systems I'm familiar with, but none that could be correctly described as "ultraviolet night-vision cameras".
I wish I'd had a chance to put in a bid on this. Perhaps I could have convinced them that they needed neutron imaging camera systems.
Lemme see 20 cameras to a mile for 700 miles... that's 14,000 cameras... with a markup of 20%... that about $250 million in pure profit...
Yep, I could retire.
Perhaps they just watched the movie by the same title and it stuck in his head. :'p
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.
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.