Yesterday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that it is buying adapted and unarmed versions of Predator drones — unmanned aircraft commonly used in war zones — to patrol the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico for smugglers. Chris Simcox, leader of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and U.S. Senate candidate, doesn’t think it’s enough. On Fox and Friends today, Simcox announced that his plan is to redirect a billion dollars from Afghanistan to putting 100 drones on the border:

We need to roll out more. We’re spending a billion dollars for drones around the world, let’s spend a billion dollars to put drones on our borders first, rather than Afghanistan. And put 30,000 troops on our border. A billion dollars could fund that and create thousands of technological jobs for our video-game age students coming out of college. Look, we can fly these drones and pick up the enemy from the comfort of the control room and never put another soldier on the battlefield.

However, the union for Border Patrol agents has criticized the drones as costly and inefficient and would rather see the money going towards adding workers and equipment on the ground. T. J. Bonner, president of the Border Patrol union, remarked:

Unmanned aircraft serve a very useful role in military combat situations, but are not economical or efficient in civilian law enforcement applications. There are a number of other technologies that are capable of providing a greater level of usefulness at a far lower cost. It appears that the contractors have once again managed to sell a bill of goods to the politicians and bureaucrats who oversee the procurement of technology designed to secure our borders.

Watch it:

Immigrant rights activist Anike Tourse of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles takes a slightly different approach. “Immigration doesn’t need high technology or military enforcement,” says Tourse. “What is really needed is immigration reform that will work toward keeping families safe and together.” According to Tourse, enforcement without reform hasn’t worked in the past.

The Associated Press reports that border officials plan on eventually having 12 drones for land patrols and six for maritime patrols. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps as being a “nativist extremist” group.

Last night, three conservative think tanks, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Heritage Foundation co-hosted a screening of the Heritage-produced film 33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age. The message of the film is that it could take as little as thirty-three minutes for a WMD-tipped missile to reach the United States, and we are defenseless against such a missile, and so we need to invest a lot more money into developing greater missile defense.

Here’s the trailer (Warning: Contains menacing, Muslim-y sounding music, as well as numerous mushroom clouds):

Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, Jr., of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation responded to some of trailer’s points here. Why only the trailer? Because, as of now, only the trailer is available publicly. The film itself is available only for private viewings. During the post-film discussion, I asked why, if the threat was as dire and imminent as the film claimed, was Heritage not releasing it in its entirety on YouTube, so anyone could watch it, and spread the word (and critique it)? Heritage’s James Carafano responded that the producers of the film preferred that it be watched and discussed in fora like the one last night. To that end, each attendee was provided with a card to request to host a private showing of the film. I’m looking into whether ThinkProgress can host one.

As the trailer suggests, the film spends a lot of time describing the disastrous consequences of a missile strike on the United States. What it failed to do, in my view, was show that any such attack was remotely likely. Neither of the two main villains of the film — Iran and North Korea — currently possess capability to strike the U.S. with a ballistic missile. And there’s no evidence that either country has any intention of courting the destruction that would be pretty much guaranteed were they to lob one at us. As for the oft-mentioned “nightmare scenario” of a terrorist with a nuke, the chances of A) a nuclear-armed state simply giving away a weapon that they’ve invested a considerable amount of resources into developing and B) a terrorist obtaining a nuke and then choosing to place it atop a missile and then firing that missile into the U.S. are, to put it charitably, vanishingly small.

Somewhat puzzlingly, in the film Carafano — who has a solid reputation as a serious, if seriously hawkish, national security analyst — spends a few minutes riffing on the threat from electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Rob Farley’s article on the EMP movement is the place to read about this. Put simply, if some ballistic missile threat scenarios skirt the edge of science fiction, EMP threat scenarios swan dive right over the cliff. I’ll grant that there’s a legitimate debate to be had over whether, given the actual size of the threat, it’s pragmatic to continue developing missile defense. I tend to think not. But I also don’t think pro-missile defense types do themselves any favors by giving cover to the EMPers.

In the effort to undercut a new START treaty, conservatives led by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) asserted that the Obama administration, in its haste to get a deal done before receiving the Nobel prize in Oslo, would undercut US national security interests by conceding to a number of Russian demands simply to get a deal done. In other words, Jon Kyl, his staff, and conservative commentators like Fred Barnes, accused the President of the United States of not putting country first. This despicable claim has now been totally discounted.

The Russians, it seems, did try to use the Nobel award to extract more concessions from US negotiators, knowing that the United States wanted to have a deal in place prior to the President’s trip to Oslo. But the Obama team refused to give in, and indicated a number of weeks ago that an agreement should not be expected.

According to Strobe Talbott the President of the Brookings Institution and notable Russia expert, the Obama team refused to budge:

The Russians may have overplayed their hand, figuring (incorrectly) that Obama was so eager for a deal that he’d grant them last-minute concessions to get it before he goes to Oslo. That’s the most likely explanation for why their military toughened its stance on some unresolved issues involving verification and monitoring. The Pentagon—in part to demonstrate that it isn’t going to be pushed around—hardened its own stand. Obama himself was miffed at the Russian squeeze play. There will still almost certainly be a treaty, although later than Obama would have liked—perhaps when he returns to Europe for the Copenhagen climate summit next week. If that happens, the Russians will have achieved nothing with their eleventh-hour tactical stonewalling. They will only have complicated negotiations on an agreement that is at least as much in their interests as the U.S.’s and slightly soured an otherwise solid relationship between their president and Obama.

So after claiming repeatedly that the President was going to sell out to the Russians, don’t conservatives like Kyl owe the President an apology for questioning his patriotism?