Are the Seabees and other Construction Battalions up to the task of building a border wall?

[Dewey_Finn]

@Bear_Nenno

@glaucon

With all due respect unless you’re talking about a wall along the same 700 miles you really can’t make that comparison. For any given stretch of wall there are going to be enormous differences in costs based on terrain and existing infrastructure and the difference may make the military cheaper or the non-military cheaper but you can’t just put one up against the other like that.

Quite so. I also believe that the military figure does not include labor costs, as those soldiers would have been paid anyway, and from a different line of accounting.

Wait, so when you said “the military can build it and they can build it cheaper”, that wasn’t at all true, and you knew it?

[bump]

@msmith537

Sounds like someone REALLY wanted to spell “RED HORSE”.

You think that’s bad?

The USAF’s other construction units are called Prime Base Engineer Emergency Force(s).

Yep, that acronyms up to “Prime BEEF”.

[DrCube]

I chose “other” because this is not a job that anyone is up to. Here’s a civil engineer explaining the problems:

Am I a wall expert? I am. I am literally a court-accepted expert on walls.

Structurally and civil engineering-wise, the border wall is not a feasible project. Trump did not hire engineers to design the thing. He solicited bids from contractors, not engineers. This means it’s not been designed by professionals. It’s a disaster of numerous types waiting to happen.

What disasters?

Off the top of my head…

1. It will mess with our ability to drain land in flash flooding. Anything impeding the ability of water to get where it needs to go (doesn’t matter if there are holes in the wall or whatever) is going to dramatically increase the risk of flooding.
2. Messes with all kind of stuff ecologically. For all other projects, we have to do an Environmental Site Assessment, which is arduous. They’re either planning to circumvent all this, or they haven’t accounted for it yet, because that’s part of the design process, and this thing hasn’t been designed.
3. The prototypes they came up with are nearly impossible to build or don’t actually do the job. This article explains more:

Writing on the Wall: Report Suggests Border Project Is Off-Track and Over Budget | Engineering.com

And so on.

The estimates provided for the cost are arrived at unreasonably. You can look for yourself at the two-year-old estimate that you see everyone citing.

https://fronterasdesk.org/sites/default/files/field/docs/2016/07/Bernstein-%20The%20Trump%20Wall.pdf

It does not account for rework, complexities beyond the prototype design, factors to prevent flood and environmental hazard creation, engineering redesign… It’s going to be higher than $50bn. The contractors will hit the government with near CONSTANT change orders. “Cost overrun” will be the name of the game. It will not be completed in Trump’s lifetime.

I’m a structural forensicist, which means I’m called in when things go wrong. This is a project that WILL go wrong. When projects go wrong, the original estimates are just obliterated. And when that happens, good luck getting it fixed, because there aren’t that many forensicists out there to right the ship, particularly not that are willing to work on a border wall project— a large quotient of us are immigrants, and besides, we can’t afford to bid on jobs that are this political. We’re small firms, and we’re already busy, and we don’t gamble our reputations on political footballs. So you’d end up with a revolving door of contractors making a giant, uncoordinated muddle of things, and it’d generally be a mess. Good money after bad. The GAO agrees with me.

[aceplace57]

I think it’s safe to assume that anything actually built will be scaled back drastically from what the President originally described during the campaign. Anyone that’s ever remodeled a home knows that feeling when our grand design meets stark financial reality.

The CNN article I linked reported DoD only found 2.5 billion in funding that can be used. There may be other limited sources of funding.

That’s maybe a few hundred more miles of security fencing. Similar to what Bush built in 2006.

Of course, there would be challenges in court and endless red tape intended to derail the project. That’s beyond the scope of this thread.

This thread has been interesting. I didn’t understand the Corps of Engineers role until it was explained. The option to use the Seabees looks like a interesting cost saving option. But, that decision is way beyond my pay grade.

[typoink]

@aceplace57

We don’t want a crumbling mess 30 years from now that our grandkids have to fix.

I do. If something gets built, I hope it’s crumbling in days. Trump gets no monuments. Every inch of wall built is something I will vote to tear down. If his slats get built, a torch and saw big enough to cut a hole goes will be at the top of my shopping list.

I don’t want a “tidy and efficient” wall. I want a boondoggle so gallingly slow, expensive, and ill-conceived it becomes a global shorthand for idiotic decision-making.

[Buck_Godot]

@Chefguy

But before any of that can happen, the whole thing has to be engineered, an environmental impact study done, plans drawn up, an RFP sent out (as mentioned above), bids evaluated, the contract let, material purchased and delivered, and contractor hiring and mobilization. This can all take a year or more.

This is why (if we ignore the horrible precedent it sets, and the possibility that once the powers are granated Trump might not just stop with the wall) having Trump exercise emergency powers to direct the military to “build the wall” might be the best way out of this clusterfuck.

Trump can claim to his base that the wall is being built, the government can open up. The Dems can claim that they stood against Trump and accuse him of being a dictator, everyone wins. Meanwhile, the military can put together a commission of a couple of dozen guys to study the wall issue, make plans, start getting the permits together, investigate eminent domain, etc… By the time they start getting ready to build, it will be February 2020, and the new incoming president can tell them that the emergency is over (never existed) and they can just scrap the whole thing.

So it’s two years of pay for a couple of dozen military bureaucrats down the drain, but that’s just a few million which is easily absorbed by the defense department as compared to an earmarked 5+ billion that can’t be used for anything else.

[enipla]

@aceplace57

There’s a political fight to avoid building the wall. It might get built anyway using Title 10 by declaring a National Emergency.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about a stupid idea.

[ExTank]

“Other.”

They have the knowledge/equipment/technical ability, but lack the numbers to do it in any reasonable time frame. This includes Army/Marine/Air Force Engineer units as well.

[SamuelA]

So…I get that there’s a proper way to build something like this wall. But could the most powerful military on earth, with 2 billion dollars it found under the couch cushions, get something up? Maybe just some of those 30 foot high slat sections?

I mean it doesn’t look that hard. If you have 2 billion or so in spare change, you :

Order as many of those steel slat sections as you can afford from whatever steel fabricators can make them. Steel might be a little pricier due to tariffs.

Pay a delivery service to deliver them.

Survey the site.

Dig some holes in the ground for the foundation

Put in whatever the foundation posts are, align them with lasers or whatever.

Start bolting or welding in the panels.

It doesn’t sound impossible to start within 45 days, at least for sections of the border where there already is an access road, already is an existing fence, and so on.

[Dag_Otto]

The civil engineer in DrCube’s post nailed it - storm drain damage is going to destroy any ill designed wall.

Which makes my plan for building it out of coal look better and better. Coal miners get back to work (with their weird death wish for a job that kills them, but hey, it’s up to them) and Mexicans get free coal. Hell, I’ll make the 30 minute drive and get some free coal too.

[rbroome]

I agree with ALL these comments.
However, one nitpick. The Republicans passed a law back in the Bush days exempting border control structures (ie the wall) from environmental impact requirements-and from hold-ups due to seizing private property.
That won’t stop any lawsuits, but it makes winning them and requiring EISs pretty much impossible. The law has been tested in court and upheld.

[nelliebly]

Starting the Wall within 45 days? Uh, sure, if it weren’t for those pesky legal details Trump so loves to ignore. Seizing land via eminent domain takes time.

Previous eminent domain attempts along the Texas border have led to more than a decade of court battles, some of which date to George W. Bush’s administration and have yet to be resolved.

Furthermore…

The complexities of the cases go far beyond pricing disputes with the landowners, and often devolve into tedious court battles over who even owns the land, and how to tell, [Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Kevin] McAleenan said.

“Some of the deeds go back to Spanish land grants and are very complex to really figure out who owns the land,” he said. “So that’s a multi-stage process…”

Trump saying he wants the wall started in 45 days is like the guy who says he wants to start painting the living room in ten minutes, conveniently forgetting he has to move out the furniture, tarp the floor, and tape the woodwork.

[kaylasdad99]

@aceplace57

Private Contractors are the most expensive option. But that’s our government for you. Everything costs 5 times as much on gov contracts.

If the country is forced to build this white elephant, it should be done as efficiently and structurally sound as possible.

We don’t want a crumbling mess 30 years from now that our grandkids have to fix.

We don’t want a crumbling mess, I’ll give you that. But if anything gets put up, it needs to be easy to clear away as soon as sanity is restored and we don’t have a stupid asshole in charge.

A 45-day window for clearing it away sounds about right.

[Brayne_Ded]

@aceplace57

Private Contractors are the most expensive option. But that’s our government for you. Everything costs 5 times as much on gov contracts.

If the country is forced to build this white elephant, it should be done as efficiently and structurally sound as possible.

We don’t want a crumbling mess 30 years from now that our grandkids have to fix.

It will be a crumbling mess, and one that will have served no purpose either. Getting over or under a wall is not so difficult. No wall is ever high enough.

I know that Our Donald wold never talk to the Chinese, but they could tell him a thing or two abut building walls along a frontier. And how well they work.