Boeing's proposal to use more than 1,000 sensor- and camera-equipped towers to secure U.S. borders has won the competition for the Department of Homeland Security's $2 billion SBInet contract, industry and congressional sources confirmed Sept. 20.

The department is expected to make a formal announcement Sept. 21. The Boeing team beat out proposals from teams led by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and cellphone-maker Ericsson.

While all of the proposals called for the integrated use of video cameras, sensors and other technology, Boeing's de-emphasized the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in favor of stationary towers to be strung out along the 7,000 miles of border the U.S. shares with Mexico and Canada. Boeing plans to use only smaller UAVs launched from the backs of trucks.

"No one technology is the silver bullet," said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security scholar at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. "What's going to secure the border is getting the right border agent to the right place at the right time to do the right thing," he added.

SBInet seeks to integrate current and next-generation technology into a single, comprehensive border security suite for Homeland Security, officials said in March when they announced the contract competition.

SBInet is a component of the wider Secure Border Initiative (SBI), unveiled by Homeland Security late last year, to deploy more personnel, new technologies and upgraded infrastructure on the border. The aim is to gain operational control of the land borders within five years. Of particular concern is trafficking - of weapons and drugs - and illegal migration along the southern border.

In fiscal 2005, Customs and Border Protection arrested 1.2 million people for illegally entering the country and seized 12,300 pounds of cocaine and 1.2 million pounds of marijuana.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he wants to create a virtual or "smart" fence that makes use of both physical tools and "tools about information-sharing and information management that lets us identify people coming across the border."

In promoting its plan to Homeland Security, Boeing emphasized its experience as an integrator of the Army's massive Future Combat Systems (FCS), which is developing 18 new manned and unmanned systems that will support the Army's future brigade.

"I think Boeing really went to school on that and really tried to apply those lessons learned to this proposal and I think that really showed," said Carafano.

Other members of Boeing's SBInet team are Unisys, L-3 Communications, Perot Systems, Kollsman and DRS Technologies.