Hammering our Swords into Plowshares

Following is my proposal to Federal and State Governments to help mitigate post war job loss and avoid the inevitable economic impact of such losses as experienced in past years as a result of defense cuts.

Phase I

My proposal is we begin to transform our defense industry to design, develop and build modern infrastructure now and for future generations.

The rational is simple. Not only do we have the opportunity to literally transform and modernize America's infrastructure, we also have the chance for the first time in the last 100 years to avoid a drastic post war defense industry and aerospace reduction. These reductions always hit our economy hard as we have thousands upon thousands of Americans depending on military contractors for their living.

We have lived through many of these, bust and boom cycles. Each cycle seems to get more severe after each war and also drive us to a permanent state of war in the interest of making sure all our new surveillance, military hardware and killing machines work in real world applications. As we know, this is just the madness President Eisenhower warned us of regarding the self perpetuating and ever growing "military industrial complex".

We start with the obvious. Move military contractors to the design, development and production of the fastest most efficient high speed rail systems on earth. With all the existing technological and intellectual infrastructure already in place within our defense contractor base, there is no reason we ever have to buy high speed rail systems from France, Germany, Canada or China.

Would it not be far more advantages in helping to mitigate loss of defense jobs to instead fast track Boeing, Lockheed/Martin, Raytheon, Honeywell along with their extensive supply bases to develop and build HSR instead of Siemens, Bombardier, TGV, or CRH? We can do it all right here and right now and protect American workers at the same time.

Parallel Phase II

Electrification of all existing rail, including commercial, freight and non HSR passenger lines can be done in parallel with HSR development. The annual cost savings on diesel fuel alone would be in the billions of dollars and the savings in diesel emissions (some of the worst due to their heavy particulate) would be in the millions of tons annually.

As a National priority this program could be called the Weapons to Transportation Modernization Act of 2013.

It could take a long time to build a HSR network in the United States that would criss-cross our Nation, it all depends on our national will to do so. In the end, whether it took years or decades the positive effects would last for many generations. How satisfying it would be to picture our grandchildren riding clean, fast rail around our country with their kids and thinking back to those days in the early 2010's when their grandparents had the vision to facilitate travel on this amazing network. I can see in my mind, Seth and Avalyn with their kids, looking out the window of a train blazing across the great plains to where ever they are going while telling them stories about our Nations history and how visionary's of the past made wonderful things happen like the train they were riding on.

Blazing into history...