Navy plans $40 million fiber-optic link to Guantánamo base

Posted on Wednesday, 07.04.12

Navy plans $40 million fiber-optic link to Guantánamo base

The $40 million project will put an underwater cable from the base in
southeast Cuba through the Windward Passage to an undisclosed link in
South Florida.
By CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

The Pentagon has decided to lay an estimated $40 million underwater
fiber-optic cable from Guantánamo Bay to South Florida, The Miami Herald
has learned, in the latest sign that the military is preparing for
detentions and other operations at the Navy base for the long-term.

"It only makes sense to do if we're going to be here for any period of
time," said Navy Capt. Kirk Hibbert, disclosing the project in an
interview last week before ending a two-year tour as the Navy base
commander.

Construction won't start for more than a year. And communications won't
come online for probably two more years

But the American military has already notified the Cuban military to
expect a surveyor ship, the USNS Zeus, off the base's coastline this
summer — a first step toward getting the program funded and then out to bid.

The fiber-optics plan is the largest known infrastructure improvement
for the base by the Pentagon, which has undertaken expansion and
building projects in a mostly piecemeal and sometimes secretive fashion
in the decade of housing war on terror captives there.

Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said the Defense Information Systems
Agency had done a "feasibility study" and put the tentative price tag at
$40 million. It will require congressional approval, he said, and is in
the fiscal 2013 budget.

At Guantánamo, Hibbert said increasing data delivery from the base,
which has both the war court and the prison camps intelligence unit, had
stretched satellite access from the outpost and planners studied whether
to expand their "terrestrial system," or go under the water with fiber
optics.

Plus, satellite links are prone to interference during bad weather, when
the century-old outpost may need connectivity the most. The base,
population about 6,000, is like a small town with a seaport, airport and
the detention center that houses 169 foreign men as captives, with 1,700
troops and contractors on temporary assignment to imprison them.

The Heritage Foundation's Cully Stimson, who was in charge of detainee
policy for the Department of Defense during the administration of
President George W. Bush, said the investment makes short-term sense
with the coming war crimes trials, notably of the five accused Sept. 11
plotters. But he warned that the investment in the infrastructure does
not necessarily signal that the Pentagon is now preparing for detention
of prisoners at Guantánamo forever.

"That naval station's been around since 1903, and it will live long past
the detention mission," said Stimson, now Heritage's chief of staff and
senior legal fellow. "It may be a fiscally prudent use of taxpayer funds."

The Pentagon also uses the 45-square-mile base as a contingency site for
humanitarian relief operations. It has fields prepared to house in tents
thousands of people who might flee social unrest or natural disaster in
the Caribbean, as refugees from Cuba and Haiti did in the 1990s.

Even if President Barack Obama were to succeed in his ambition to close
the detention center, Stimson said, the infrastructure there could be
put to other use.

Maintaining Guantánamo is expensive, and the constant churn of prison
staff adds to the cost. Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, the recently departed
public affairs officer, said the prison estimates it costs taxpayers $77
a day to house and feed a soldier or sailor assigned to detention center
duty.

The Bush administration built a series of prison camps for the 779
detainees who have passed through the place, including a still-secret
building for former CIA captives. The Navy also put in a sports field,
renovated housing and leases trailer parks for rotating detention center
forces. And it has a variety of overlapping and at-times unreliable
communications systems — from a contract cable TV and Internet plan that
troops must pay for, to a no-charge, molasses-slow Wi-Fi system and
sophisticated teleconferencing for the commanders.

Rear Adm. David B. Woods, ending 10 months as prison camps commander,
revealed last week that he had staff cut the prison's monthly telephone
bill from $21,000 a month to $5,000 — no small feat, he said, because
the Pentagon lets captives make phone calls to family across the globe
as part of a Red Cross program.

Cuba doesn't get a veto on the project, or any activity on the base,
which is surrounded by 17.4 miles of fence line patrolled by Marines in
southeast Cuba. The United States says it's a lawful tenant under a 1934
treaty and sends an annual rent check from a Swiss bank for $4,085 to
Havana — even after Fidel Castro told the U.S. military to get out in
the 1960s.

The base captain meets monthly with his Cuban counterparts. During a
recent meeting, Hibbert said, he alerted them that the surveyor ship
would be off base waters this summer. He said he got no opposition from
the Cuban military after he characterized it this way: The U.S. is
setting up "reliable, more robust communications" to update the
"antiquated system we have now."

Even before that, Hibbert said, U.S. officials sent a diplomatic note to
Havana, notifying Cuba about the fiber-optic program.

A State Department spokesman would not disclose what the Cuban
government was told about the project, or when. It's policy to keep such
communications secret, said William Ostick of the Western Hemisphere
Affairs division.

Nor would the Pentagon disclose where the cable would likely come ashore
in South Florida after passing through the Windward Passage east of Cuba
and emerging from the Atlantic Ocean — Key West, just 80 miles north of
Havana, Miami, or somewhere else. Key West and Miami are roughly an
equidistant 600 nautical miles from Guantánamo on a path around the
eastern end of the island.

The technology is not new.

Telegraph then telephone cables have been on the ocean floor for more
than a century, experts say, and for a time the base had a phone line
from Guantánamo's aptly named Cable Beach to Jamaica. Undersea fiber
optics came into their own about 30 years ago, according to Vincent
Chan, a professor of electric engineering who specializes in the subject
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "and they get better every
year."

"It's routine," he said. "Every time you make a long distance to call to
Europe or Asia you're basically using this technology. They're not using
satellites any more."

At this stage, he added, it's easy to install and a 600-nautical-mile
link could be accomplished in six months, depending on the contractor
and how much infrastructure needs to be built at either end.

Ships with massive coils of coated fiber-optic cable the circumference
of your wrist reel the cable into the sea. Think of a commercial
fisherman, Chan said, but "instead of deploying a trap they're deploying
a cable."

Fiber-optic cables require an undersea signal amplifier — a laser — at
30-mile intervals to keep the signal strong.

The only place where the cable might be susceptible to sabotage, he
said, is in shallow water, where it emerges to link to a land station.
Most of it is so deep in the ocean the only danger is a break, in which
case a repair boat would reel it back out and reconnect it.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/04/2881436/navy-plans-40-million-fiber-optic.html