Talk about obnoxious...

[Occhidiangela]

Would you just drop the Maginot etc comparisions. You dont seem to understand that just because Military type enforcment is used that doesnt make comparable to a real war.

Your advocacy of a wall is consistent with the logic of the Maginot Line.  It doesn't match the strategic future threat. Your understanding of the evolution of war and Grand Strategy is pathetic. This isn't 1914.

War in the moden age, an extension of power politics, is often undeclared.  At this point, "war" as a subset of conflict between nation states has to be considered using all elements of national power.  Force, economy, population, information, diplomatic ties: the whole package.

The Marquis de Queensbury rules are not universally enforced, nor have they been, for about the last 60 years.  Hadn't you noticed? 

]A border defense primarily aimed at keeping out unarmed civialians who pose no tactical thread when they do penetrate is closer to a prisions situation than an invading army situation.

If you don't defend your borders, and if you don't enforce them, they dissolve and are rendered moot. That is a sacrifice of sovereignty.

You, like most, fall for the trap. "Unarmed civilans" pose a political threat, and an economic threat. They have for some time. Why do you think you hear the cries in certain sectors to Allow Illegal Aliens To Vote? Who benefits from that? Who else is infiltrating with them, minnow in the stream of infiltrators?

You choose to view "war" and "tactical threat" only with armed conflict between armies. We are dealing with political strategy here: the exercise of political power, or national power, between nations to pursue political aims. One of the best ways to win is to fight assymetrically against your opponent.

The fig leaf of "the innocent civilian" fools you into accepting the infilatration of your country as something other than what it is: an infringement of American sovereignty deliberately sponsored by the Mexican Government. (Think the Mariel Boat Lift, on steroids) The camoflage by propaganda has fooled you, your choice of language betrays that.

Its not the same as a prision but the objective of the wall itself is similar to a prision wall. It slows people down and gives gaurds a more time to react.

This thread has become an example of the poor reasoning you have employed before. You make valid points against something(you additional gaurds are better than a wall) then you make an absurd conculsion("Benefit of wall: zero above current border deterrence ")

A wall won't stop people, it only slows them down. The infiltration is a long term problem, not a video game like hours long threat. It is also a dynamic problem.

At least you remain true to form: you demonstrate that you are hoodwinked by the propaganda campaign, so I am guilty of poor reasoning? I show you what is happening through a strategic lens, and you choose to stuff your fingers in your ears and sing lalalalalala. Your choice.

Obviously the current gaurds plus a wall would be better than just the current gaurds, yet by talking a lot you convince yourself other wise.

When a policy isn't working, which the current policy isn't in terms of stemming illegal immigration, it needs to change. What is a powerful enough disincentive for desparate people to convince them that crossing the border is not in their interest? A wall is merely one more obstacle to cross for a resolute man.

Also just making up vague numbers like "billions" doesnt really make you look authorative.

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I make that estimate based on what I think the force levels are required for the border. I haven't sat down and devised a complete Operations Plan -- I am not on active duty anymore.

I can only work orders of magnitude. Two divisions.

With a bit over one division a year in Bosnia, we spent a couple of billion. The OPTAR necessary to run a divsion 24/7 runs in the low billions. This depends on if you go light, light heavy, or heavy. I would use a light division, with a plus up of a couple of extra battalions of helicopters, extra C2 support, plussed up with added MP's for PoW administration and confinement. (Depending on RoE.) I would add artillery into the mix at high density avenues of approach.

I estimate "billions" for the wall, but I may be lowballing it. The cost could be in tens of billions. Basis? The cost of the Big Dig in Boston, a massive infrastructure project of somewhat greater complexity, which has passed the 11 billion originally budgeted for it. The "Wall" is an infrastructure project of similar scope and scale, but of a different sort of civil engineering challenge.

What have you offered as an estimate, and on what basis? Nothing. Go do your own homework before you malign my estimates, and show your work. :whistling:

You don't see an invasion, I do, and I have since about 1991. The difference in perspective has taken this discussion to your usual departure into insult. Once again, "where you sit determines what you see."

The policy and strategy in Mexico City: support invasion by infiltration. NAFTA didn't solve their inherent economic problems, nor did a multi billion dollar bail out of the peso. Clever folks in Mexico City have more than one strategy, they aren't stupid. Corrupt, maybe, but not stupid.

So, consider other strategies. This strategy has multiple political motives: one (poorly covered) is to overturn the loss of the Southwest in the 1800's; the other (more obvious) is to ease off the population pressure in a country with a shrinking middle class. Another is to embed elected politicians in the US Congress who are sympathetic to Mexico and Mexican perspectives. This is a long term plan, not a short term strategy.

The beneficial effect of billions of dollars in hard currency, sent from workers in America, legal and otherwise, to families in dire straits back home in Mexico, ameliorates slightly the econominc problems in Mexico, and a number of its southern neighbors.

The meme about "immigrants made America" is flawed due to expired context, and is part of a deliberate propaganda campaign. Our industrial base is not growing, as it did during a century of massive immigration, it is shrinking. The labor market is not static, it is dynamic. The "need" for immigrants to fill a labor market is NOT what it was during our explosive growth period. The appeal to a fallacious analogue to the European and Asian migrations into America is a smoke screen, and part of The Big Lie. The poorly enforced policy on quotas and legal immigration levels is adjustable, and must be adjustable based in American needs, not the needs of the world's desperate in their various desparate countries. "Send me poor, your huddled masses" was a poem, an after the fact romanticization of the great migrations. It was not an act of Congress, and not an iron clad policy. Nor should it be.

If there is no pressure relief for a poor population with dim prospects for economic growth, what happens in Mexico? Given its culture and history, most likely internal unrest, certainly economic strife. No one in power in Mexico City is fool enough to adopt a policy counterproductive to the long term interests of their embedded Oligarchical power structure, nor to stability -- not if another strategy can be pursued.

That strategy has been an ongoing flushing of their econmic and population problems north, and in allowing others to pass through as well. They don't want Central American problems exported to them, but they are happy to export theirs north. This strategy fulfills multiple aims with one method: the migration north. It is a politically supported infiltration, not innocent immigration. The sheep who are herded north are often oblivious to how they are being used, as sheep often are.

On our side of the border, creating another class of dependents and patronage is of benefit to some vested interstes. Besides the political patronage networks, cheap labor is cheap labor, just as attractive to many current companies as it was to Dupont, to Morgan, to Ford, to the Union Pacific Railroad in the days of laize faire capitalism.

Consider the iron law of wages and labor dumping, which is similar to product dumping tactics used to take over a market. Among the long term political aims is a sort of reconquista of the Southwest, and the more practical near term aim of dissolving the border: that act would allow Mexico to keep dumping its problems on the US, whose taxpayers are sheered to support it, or whose services degrade as a consequence of over use of limited resources.

The strategy is not solely attractive to folks in Mexico City. Their allies in this nation, the willing and the blissfully ignorant, are a fifth column who is, at the moment, given privileged sanctuary.

The "wall" solves nothing without a shoot to kill order, or without a significant construction of internment and repatriation camps for those captured. Then there is the hidden logistic cost of transporting those to be repatriated back to where they belong. More tens of millions of dollars. Shoot to kill is both a far cheaper policy, and a better deterrent.

Let's not fool ourselves. A defended border solves part of the problem. The more difficult task, uprooting the fifth column, is an undertaking that, IMO, dwarfs the so called "war on terror" in scope and scale, and in the political will to carry it through.

What did Pogo say? "We have met the enemy, and he is us." :P

I have little confidence in the current leadership, in either party, being able to form a coherent policy until some move is made to actually enforce the borders, and to fund the INS and Border Patrol at appropriate levels, and to sack those who turn a blind eye, or are on the take. And to send a signal that crossing the border other than at lawful checkpoints is a deadly dangerous risk decision.

I also have little confidence that the average citizen stays aware enough to see through the propaganda smoke screens.

Don't waste time building a wall, Mr Maginot: walls can be outflanked both physically and politically.

If we are to spend billions on infrastructure of FDR scale public works, there are roads and bridges all over the country in need of repair, but no need for an outflankable wall.

Occhi