Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009 - 34

A G E N C Y OV E RV I E W With Commissioner W. Ralph Basham U.S. Customs and Border Protection P resident-elect Obama just named Governor Janet Napolitano his choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security, what do you think of her selection? I think she is the perfect person for the job, and she is especially familiar with CBP. I’m hopeful that she will agree and continue to support our strategy that the key to protecting our borders is to push our borders out and use our borders here at home as a last line of defense. I hope that she ensures that the strategy continues to be enhanced and developed. How is CBP different than its’ predecessors, what does the CBP look like today? Our predecessors had a serious ﬂaw that prevented, in my opinion, the ability to complete their missions because there was no coordination on intelligence gathering. The Border Patrol and Customs Service all had their own systems and ways of gathering intelligence. When we consolidated the agencies, we had to develop a process to share this information to allow us to get smarter and better informed which ultimately allows agents to better do their job. We are now an The agency needs to agency of 58,000 employees think differently than we with an $11 billion budget. have previously in the past, We are responsible for we need to train our agents terrorist threats, we, like to think as one mind, to DHS, now are an all-threats think like our enemies. agency, but our core mission continues to be to ensure that our nation remains open for trade and travel, if we shut down trade and travel, the enemy will have won. SBInet and the prime contractor Boeing have come under a lot of ﬁre over the past 18 months for not delivering what was expected, can you expand a little on SBInet and the future of the program? SBInet was a much larger challenge than we anticipated, Boeing has admitted that it didn’t give it’s best effort and we here at CBP terribly mismanaged the message on what could and would be delivered in June 2007. Boeing has really developed a team of the best people and the best minds. I feel that SBInet will be successful and a useful tool to control the border between ports of entry, it was a very ambitious project and we handled it very badly in delivering realistic expectations for Congress and I take full responsibility for that. What challenges still lie ahead for CBP? There are a couple different challenges that CBP continues to have that we are working on. We must continue to ensure that we are a fully integrated intelligence organization, that we are sharing the right information with each other to successfully complete our missions. The agency needs to think differently than we have previously in the past, we need to train our agents to think as one mind, to think like our enemies. We need to continue to make sure that we focus on the possibility of an insider threat. I don’t doubt for one second our agents’ loyalty and dedication, but with 58,000 employees we operate in one of the largest threat environments in the world and our enemies might try to use our people against us. We need to take training to our people in the ﬁeld, we have one of the largest police forces in the world, where almost half of the agents have less than ﬁve years on the job and we have to ﬁnd more vehicles and venues to bring training to them. Do you anticipate any problems during the transition from you to your successor whoever that might be? I’m not too worried about the transition, the leadership that CBP has is one of the strongest teams that I have ever worked with. They understand the focus, challenge and the mission. This is my fourth agency within DHS that I have led and I wouldn’t have traded this team for anything in the world. Do you have any ﬁnal thoughts about the CBP that you would like to share? I truly believe that one of the reasons that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11 is because of the men and women on the borders, pushing them out further. They are the front line and stand between us and those who want to do us harm. Hopefully, everyday they get up and go to work knowing that they are protecting us and they can go home every night and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. n W. Ralph Basham is the former Commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection Agency. 32 | Homeland Defense Journal Visit www.homelanddefensejournal.com

Homeland Defense Journal - January 2009

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