JERUSALEM, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Israel's success in building a massive security fence, or barrier, to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers during the second intifada has impressed some unlikely admirers.
Now Saudi Arabia, like India, is building not one, but two separate border fences on different fronts. The first is on its southern border and is intended to try and get its illegal immigration of 400,000 people a year from neighboring Yemen under control. The second, far more ambitious one, is along the Saudi border with Iraq and is an attempt to prevent Islamist extremists in Iraq, both Sunni and Shiite, from exporting their violence and doctrines back into Saudi Arabia.
However, modern barriers are not just about orders for barbed wire and concrete: They are also about night-vision enhancers and sensors, and every kind of high-tech electronic gadgetry to detect explosives, weapons, drugs and whatever else terrorist organizations and drug gangs try to get across closely monitored borders.
Even the United States has belatedly moved to tighten its borders, especially its southern one with Mexico, by additional construction. If immigration issues and the backlash against immigration proves to be a significant force, especially in the U.S. Southwest, in the 2008 elections, then President Bush's still relatively modest investment in a new border fence along the U.S.-Mexican border may lead to much more massive construction and investment in the near future.
So far, the huge European Union has ignored the trend from India and Saudi Arabia to Israel and the United States to build much stronger and more formidable border defenses. But that may change, too. Many experts and prominent political figures like Lord Michael Ancram, the former deputy leader of Britain's Conservative Party, have expressed concern that global warming is already making huge regions of sub-Saharan Africa so uninhabitable that many millions of people will try and flee from there to get into Britain and the rest of the European Union.
Sexy, high-profile military items like fighter aircraft, main battle tanks and submarines or aircraft carriers attract the most publicity in defense procurement. But sometimes the long-term demand for apparently more mundane but vitally necessary “meat and potatoes” weapons and materiel like automatic rifles, barbed wire, patrol vehicles or even just old fashioned concrete can prove more reliably lucrative in the long run.
Nor are huge security fences a waste of money. The French Maginot Line is remembered as a failure because the Germans simply attacked around it in May 1940 to conquer France. But the line itself was a tactical success in that even the dreaded Wehrmacht at the height of its power never dared to attack it head-on. Had the French Third Republic had the resources and the political will to extend the Maginot Line west all the way to the English Channel, the German blitzkrieg would never have worked. The German Siegfried Line, once fully manned, held up even Gen. George S. Patton, the greatest of Western aggressive armored commanders, in the late fall and early winter of 1944.
And though the East German Berlin Wall was dramatically torn down in 1989, it had done its job for 28 years before that. Had the Wall not been built, the East German communist dictatorship would have collapsed a full generation before it did.
Given the global patterns of population growth, emigration and terrorism, it seems a safe bet that investments in contractors specializing in border security and passive defense items will stay healthy for many years to come.
