The Department of Defense is expected to announce in a press conference on Tuesday that it intends to orchestrate a military buildup along the Mexican border with Arizona and New Mexico. In the next several weeks, the military will begin sending personnel stationed at Texas’ Fort Bliss to patrol the border region. There are as yet no specific details on how many military personnel will be stationed in this region, or precisely where they will be placed, but Southern Arizonans will likely begin seeing an increase in soldiers, military vehicles and equipment in their communities in the coming weeks.
Last month the Department of Homeland Security officially began pulling National Guard troops out of Southern Arizona and the U.S.-Mexico border region, where they had been stationed since August 2010. The goal stated by DHS was to decrease the then 1200 soldiers stationed on the ground along the border, in favor of increasing aerial surveillance of the region. This expected announcement by the Department of Defense is thus a dramatic reversal in the existing U.S. policy favoring the drawback of military forces patrolling the border region on the ground.
Proponents of the increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border argue that it is vital to our nation’s effort to secure our border against unauthorized immigration, encroaching drug-related violence and terrorist threats that we continue to station military forced in this region. Ariz. Gov. Jan Brewer is a particularly vocal supporter of this effort, and claims to have been influential in convincing President Obama to introduce National Guard troops to this region in the first place. Upon the recent decision to withdraw these troops, Brewer lamented, “Rather than withdrawing National Guard troops, the president ought to consider using them as a long-term tool to augment the nation's border-security strategy.”
However, those critical of the buildup of military forces along the border argue that this is simply not an efficient, economical and effective manner of patrolling this region. With the annual cost of the National Guard deployment in this area at over $110 million, it is simply much more reasonable to use this money to develop high tech radar, camera and sensor systems as well as to increase aerial surveillance of the region, as these technologies are simply a more effective way of securing the border.
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