seeker_two
My posts don't count....
A "lot" of snipers...
Okay, let's put snipers on the border. How hard will that be. Now we figure snipers are good to 1000 yards on a reasonable basis, but in field conditions, that can be much more difficult and require numerous shots for a kill, so let's call it 600 with a high level of certainty.
So the border is 1954 miles with Mexico. Some 700 miles are already fenced, but the reality of it is that the fence there pretty much sucks as people go under it, over it, and through it. So converting miles to yards gives us 3439040 yards. Divide that by 1200 (600 yard radius) gives us the need for 2866 non-overlapping sniper fields of fire. It isn't enough to have a sniper in a given position, but a sniper team of at least 2, more if you are going to include actual security and such. You would minimally need three shifts a day, if not six. Assuming two man teams, that would mean 5732 operators on duty at any one time, or 17196 a day for 3 shifts or 34392 operators with 6 shifts if you don't want to overstress them to the point of being ineffective. Assuming you aren't working them more than 40 hours a week, you will need 40% more to cover the weekends, so you will need 24075 to 48149 plus additional members to cover illness, vacation, etc.
So we just need to ramp up sniper school operations (which will cost millions) and train the additional 10s of thousands of snipers that will have to be vetted personnel, of course. They will take 10s of millions to train and another 100 million a year or so to pay, not to mention additional overhead of supervision and such. Never mind all of the improvements to the landscape that will have to be made to make sure all of the sniper positions are actually suitable.
But otherwise, yeah, we can just whip that together in the mean time while we are waiting on a wall to be built.
Good point.
What's the numbers on gunship patrols with thermal imaging and air strikes?