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[–]Chempergrill0 points
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Your idea is much more expensive than it sounds, and more expensive than a wall over time. It requires a lot of people continuously manning it.
Suppose the total expense for a border sniper is $100k/year.
You'll need perhaps 3 of them per mile (in quiet sections), working in 3 shifts per day to continuously watch the border with overlapping coverage. So a total of 9 snipers employed per mile of border.
This gives an ongoing sniper expense of $900k/year per mile that must be continually trained and recruited. All these people require organizational overhead. I will make the WILDLY optimistic assumption of a very efficient bureaucracy and simply round up to $1Million per year per mile. This excludes electric fence construction and maintenance costs.
A border wall of the type being discussed costs around $10 Million per mile.
So compared to the sniper-fence scheme, the wall will pay for itself in 10 years and potentially stand for centuries.
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[–] Chempergrill ago (edited ago)
Your idea is much more expensive than it sounds, and more expensive than a wall over time. It requires a lot of people continuously manning it.
Suppose the total expense for a border sniper is $100k/year.
You'll need perhaps 3 of them per mile (in quiet sections), working in 3 shifts per day to continuously watch the border with overlapping coverage. So a total of 9 snipers employed per mile of border.
This gives an ongoing sniper expense of $900k/year per mile that must be continually trained and recruited. All these people require organizational overhead. I will make the WILDLY optimistic assumption of a very efficient bureaucracy and simply round up to $1Million per year per mile. This excludes electric fence construction and maintenance costs.
A border wall of the type being discussed costs around $10 Million per mile.
So compared to the sniper-fence scheme, the wall will pay for itself in 10 years and potentially stand for centuries.