Detention Beds?

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ICE thinks that, were the Laken Riley Act, which mandates immediate detention pending deportation of illegal aliens who have been arrested for theft of one sort or another, to be enacted, they would need, among other things, an additional $3 billion due to the agency needing an additional 60,000 detention beds.

That cost is heavily impacted by the fanciness of the beds.

Sixty thousand army cots from a big-name store would cost just $8.7 million, assuming no discount for such a large buy.

Other cots are available through big-name general marketer Amazon.com for prices around $55 each, or $3.3 million, again assuming no large buy discount.

Military surplus cots can be had for as low as $31—$1.86 million for the 60,000.

A 50ftx100ft Quonset hut can be had for $29,000 in construction kit form that, when assembled, provides a complete, weather tight shelter. That hut could easily shelter 120 illegal aliens on those cots. That works out to some 500 huts for $14.5 million. Add porta-potty latrines and a couple of Quonset huts for food preparation and eating, and we’re bringing in the detention facilities for less than $20 million.

Of course, those numbers make no allowance for segregating the detainees by sex. Having male- and female-only huts, though, would add only trivially to the cost, and most of that increment would be in added personnel to enforce the segregation.

If those $3 billon really are committed, the remainder should be for personnel. At an estimated $80k salary plus $13k payroll tax per additional ICE, CBP, and ESO agent, those remaining $2.8 billion could hire 28,500 more.

Whether an additional 28,500 are needed or not, the larger point is that the money should go toward the men and women who put their lives on the line going after these thugs, and not in housing them in unneeded luxury.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Identity Politics

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James Freeman had an interesting op-ed on this subject. At the end of his piece, he quoted Michael Baharaeen, who blogs at the Liberal Patriot [emphasis in the quote]:

One such risk [political…of focusing on identity politics] is coming to believe that the shared characteristic that binds a group of people together is the most important factor informing that group’s voting habits… conceiving of any group in monolithic terms risks missing meaningful differences within it. Even terms like “Latino” have limited utility, as they lump the very different life experiences of people with ancestry in, say, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia into one broad category….

Indeed. It might be more useful, instead, to focus on the differing positions, perspectives, ideas themselves without any regard for who, or which group, has them. Maybe Party would be better served, be more attuned to what makes us all Americans, to treat us all as the individual Americans that we are, rather than as this or that collected subset of us and then pretend to care about each group.

The First Move Should Be…

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The incoming Trump administration is looking spring-loaded to begin mining the sea bed for minerals that are just lying around waiting to be scooped up and harvested. The new Congress looks ready to support that.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed its annual defense funding bill, which included a provision instructing the secretary of defense to provide a feasibility study on whether minerals from the deep sea could be processed within the US.
That follows a number of cabinet appointments by Trump seen as friendly to deep-sea mining. Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Howard Lutnick, and William McGinley have all been nominated for positions on the president-elect’s team and have all previously voiced support for ocean mining.

Aside from the benefits of mining the sea floors, including those on our continental shelf and elsewhere in our Exclusive Economic Zone, our first move, or at least a very early move, should be the floor of the South China Sea, which is rife with minerals, especially those critical to energy, to any energy transitions, to computing, to defense-related technologies, and so on.

We also should move to help our friends and those who would be friends around the rim of the Sea do their own sea bed mining within their Exclusive Economic Zones and help mediate disputes among those nations over whose EEZ applies where and how to deal with the claimed overlaps.

The People’s Republic of China will protest most loudly and aggressively, but it’s long past time their seizure and occupation of these international waters and the waters in those EEZs gets answered and the PRC pushed back into its own waters.

A Foolish Question

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors note that California’s Progressive-Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has waived some permitting requirements for some folks to facilitate their rebuilding efforts in the wake of the fires burning to ashes some suburbs of Los Angeles. Then they ask

Why not ease regulations for all projects if the rules are such a barrier to development?

It’s clear enough why not. Newsom hasn’t had the epiphany the editors’ headline at the link claims; he’s pandering to the uber-rich and to the upper middle class folks in what is really a narrow slice of the whole of California. Those rich who’ve lost their homes to the fires are major donors to him and to Party. The waiver is limited to these panderees because throughout that whole of the rest of California, Green groups and unions operate, and they’re major donors, also, to Newsom and to Party.

Espionage Tit-for-Tat

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Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director and Secretary of State, seems to be settling for that, particularly vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China. To be sure, such a position would represent a large improvement over past administrations’ position.

US federal and state officials should demand reciprocity in the relationship with China. If US entities are barred from investing in areas China deems a national-security risk, we shouldn’t allow China to invest in areas that could pose a risk to us—such as Chinese entities buying land near our military bases. If US firms must consent to technology transfers and party oversight to do business in China, Chinese firms shouldn’t be able to do business here without more oversight. If our diplomats can’t freely and privately communicate with Chinese citizens, we shouldn’t tolerate Chinese officials doing so with US citizens. If fewer than 1,000 American students study at Chinese universities annually, we shouldn’t grant visas to nearly 300,000 students from China—especially when some of them engage in scientific espionage, intellectual-property theft and other hostile activities.

That’s insufficient, though. Tit-for-tat doesn’t work in kinetic combat, and it doesn’t work in espionage combat: in either situation, it surrenders (not merely cedes) initiative to the enemy and leaves us scrambling desperately to keep up. At the modern pace of combat, that’s not just a failing proposition, that guarantees we lose the combat, and we lose the wider war encompassing that combat. And that costs us our freedom of action, our very sovereignty.

What’s necessary is going on the offensive, and escalating faster than the PRC can adapt—leave that enemy nation scrambling and trying to keep up.

If the PRC interferes with our water, electricity, etc infrastructure by planting malware for future triggering, we should shut down significant fractions of that nation’s water, electricity, etc networks. Yes, that should include shutting off the controls for the Three Gorges Dam. If the PRC hacks into our government facilities, we should hack deeply into PRC government and CPC facilities and publish the data taken. If the PLAN or PLAAF run intimidation exercises around the Republic of China, we should blanket those forces with ECM and isolate them from their mainland command centers.

We should plant malware of our own in the PRC’s government agencies (including PLA command and control network nodes at all levels of the hierarchy) and network control nodes. We should plant malware in our own agencies and network control nodes to be stolen along with legitimate data, for our later use. We should be building into the computer chips we do allow to be sold into the PRC and its allies hardware malware for our future use.

Yes, we’d be giving away some of our capabilities, but sometimes letting our enemy know what we’re capable of—kinetically, cybernetically, and especially mentally—is contributory to deterrence.

The opportunity for offensive activity abound. It’s time to stop being timid about it. And if we don’t have those capabilities, we need to know the reasons why and get rid of the managers in our defense and intelligence facilities who’ve so badly and dangerously failed us.