Were you the one a few weeks back that provide a link to a mobile modular sensor tower? If so, could you post it again if you can find it?
I can’t cut and paste the link right now, but I saw the post (from 2 July), by using the search function ofFree Republic (“Search” in the top left corner).
I searched for the word “Anduril”, in the category “title”.
Also, some time further back, I posted another article about a contract award for a lot of rapidly deployable buildings - the size of shipping containers, that fold out/ pop up in a few hours on site.
The speculation was that the Border Patrol might be planning to establish some rural operational bases, for improved monitoring and response in remote areas - perhaps operating some of the new technology, such as tower or aerostat (blimp) basing sensors, and/or a squadron of drones.
Alternatively, those shelters may have been a contingency for housing a surge in the number of detainees, which was at crisis levels back then.
Anduril’s Autonomous Surveillance Towers (AST) are now a Program of Record (built into the long term budget for lifecycle costs like annual operations, maintenance, training and replacements).
They have been in use since 2018, and CBP liked the results. First they ordered six for evaluation, then 54 more to deploy, and then 140 more for deployment (200 total on hand or on order). By the end of next year, they will be flooding the zone. 200 more Mobile Surveillance Systems, which are vehicle mounted, manned systems from a different vendor, will also be deploying this year and next.
Anduril’s unmanned system (AST) can set up in an hour, and operate off the grid using solar panels (the Southern Border is the best part of the country for solar). The feeds from their sensors are integrated to the monitoring software in the command posts, as well as some autonomous (onboard) recognition ability, and direct alerting of nearby Border Patrol Officers.
These new Ghost drones will network in with the Lattice software system, so multiple sensor feeds can be fused, and artificial intelligence on big, fast computers in the command post or cloud can chew on the data, and quickly learn to get better and better at picking out infiltrators.
These drones are being developed for general Military use, so they will likely become increasingly autonomous in their flight and operations - replacements taking off in time to relieve those on station, before they must return to base to recharge, and coordinating amongst themselves to operate in a swarm, like a pack of wolves.