Swords into Plowshares developments

In conversation with someone about Swords into Plowshares back in the mid-1990s. It was not long after the Rebbe MHM had said the famous Sicha explaining that this Messianic prophecy of Isaiah had begun to be fulfilled, and I had been speaking and writing about it. In this encounter I was explaining to my friend that we can see in the world various ways in which Swords into Plowshares is being implemented. He was not easily convinced. In the end he reluctantly agreed but added, “I will not be convinced that Swords into Plowshares is actually happening until I see someone take a sword and actually reshape it into a plowshare.” Restraining myself, I responded, “You’re missing the point. Anyone could have done that two thousand years ago. The point of the prophecy is that there will be a fundamental change in the way nations relate to each other. As a result, military resources and technology etc. will be redirected and transformed for peaceful purposes.”

Nevertheless, to make my friend happy (I hope he reads Beis Moshiach), I want to mention some developments where military equipment (swords) have been used to plow and plant in the ground—swords into plowshares, literally.

Tanks for the Plows!

Many tanks and other heavy armored vehicles, which have been made surplus in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after the Swords into Plowshares declaration, have been transformed for civilian use. A considerable number of vehicles have been converted to a variety of such uses in countries such as the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Belarus and Russia.

These uses include:

bulldozers

firefighting vehicles

cranes

power-unit vehicles

mineral fine-crushing vehicles

quarry vehicles

rescue vehicles

casualty evacuation vehicles

transportation vehicles

oil-rig vehicles

transport vehicles for oil and chemical products

spill-cleaning vehicles

tracked ice-breaking prime movers

environmental vehicles.

And—last but not least—plows! [See the accompanying photos.]

 In May 2015, The Siberian Times reported on the Ivanov brothers from the rural settlement of Karatuzskoye in Krasnoyarsk Krai, who bought old T-62 Russian tanks from the military in the 1990s—for the price of scrap metal—and converted them into giant plows by replacing the gun turret with the driver’s cab of a Kirovets tractor.

Their farm covers about 400 hectares (about 990 acres) of land, half of which is sown with grain and the tank is used to plow the land and sow the oats and wheat.

“Like it is says in the Bible, we wanted to ‘beat swords into plowshares’,” Dmitry Ivanov said. “When you work with a standard DT-75 tractor it takes all day but on the tank you do the same work in just one or two hours. It does ten times more work per day due to the power of the engine…The speed is 22 km per hour. Tractors do not have such a speed. Besides it also starts easily in a strong frost and blizzards, and it works in any weather.” They are also more fuel efficient.

The only problem, the brothers say, is getting spare parts for repairs as they are difficult to obtain in stores and garages.

In fact, a lot of military equipment is easily converted to civilian use because they may not be deadly weapons, although they are part of the military arsenal of armed forces. But most lethal weapons systems can also be converted because they are a combination of a piece of transport equipment (such as a vehicle chassis, an aircraft or a ship) and a lethal element (such as a gun or missile) mounted upon the transport part. In some cases, such as towed artillery, the transport equipment part is minimal while in others, such as lightly-armed landing ships, the weapon itself is of minor importance. So it is easy to transform such military equipment for civilian reuse simply by taking the weapon part away and using the transport equipment element.

In addition to armored vehicles, other types of military equipment have undergone a Swords into Plowshares transformation, such as:

Helicopters for police missions, search-and-rescue and transport.

In the United States alone, hundreds of surplus military OH-58 and Bell Jet-Ranger helicopters have been converted to law enforcement and public safety related use.

Military training aircraft have been reassigned to civilian flight training, sometimes after the removal of specific avionic equipment.

Small landing ships are now used as ferries, and small transport ships and tenders for civilian transport purposes.

We are so close to the end. All we need to do is open our eyes, and in the blink of an eye we will have the complete Geulah—including plenty of spare parts for all our Tanks-to-Plows!

Aerial Reforestation

Forests are an important part of the natural order on earth. In addition to trees, many plant and animal species live in the forest. National Geographic reports that 70% of plants and animals on the earth live in forests.  Trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and produce oxygen which we need to breathe. All of this is necessary for the balance of nature. In addition, forests are the source of lumber. But in the past hundred years, millions of acres of forests have been lost due to forest fires and trees being cut down. It’s not just the lumber industry; many forests have been cut down so that the land can be used for farming. Also, in many poor countries where fuel is not available, people have cut down their forests for firewood.

The loss of forests may even lead to the loss of lives. Forests prevent soil erosion. Trees hold the soil intact, and areas that have lost their trees risk losing valuable soil to wind and especially to rain. Landslides caused by heavy rains on such areas often result in many deaths. In a country such as Honduras, for example, which has many hills and mountains and is frequently hit by hurricanes, thousands of lives are lost to landslides.

Traditional reforestation methods, using machinery on the ground, is tedious and time-consuming and can replace only a tiny percentage of these trees.

The Air Force to the Rescue

The C-130 military transport aircraft, designed and built by Lockheed-Martin, was designed to transport troops and military equipment, and for the medical evacuation (“medevac”) of troops wounded in battle. It has also been used by the military for laying carpets of landmines across combat zones.

In the late 1990s, Lockheed Martin, following up on an idea proposed earlier by Dr. Jack Walters of the University of British Columbia, a former RAF pilot, transformed the C-130 aircraft into a massive machine for planting trees.

In an interview with The Guardian back in 1999 Peter Simmons of Lockheed explained what they did:

“Equipment we developed for precision planting of fields of landmines [was] adapted easily for planting trees. There are 2,500 C-130 transport aircraft in 70 countries, so the delivery system for planting forests is widely available—mostly mothballed in military hangers waiting for someone to hire them.

“The possibilities are amazing. We can fly at 1,000 feet at 130 knots planting more than 3,000 cones a minute in a pattern across the landscape—just as we did with landmines, but in this case each cone contains a sapling. That’s 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000 trees a day.”

Imagine that—planting almost a million trees a day! A man on the ground can plant at most about a thousand, and at a much higher cost.

Early experiments in Aerial Reforestation ran into difficulties. Many of the pods dropped hit debris on the ground and failed to actually take root.

Improvements in the system were made by Moshe Alamaro, an Israeli engineer working at MIT. He developed a conical canister made from a strong biodegradable material containing a seedling packed in soil. It also contains fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture, watering the roots of the tree. His system uses a combination of ballistics and navigation technology—military technologies developed for the Star Wars program and Operation Desert Storm, the Persian Gulf War—to place the saplings accurately. The tree cones are pointed and designed to bury themselves in the ground at the same depth as if they had been planted by hand. They are strong enough to withstand the impact but still decompose quickly. After they are dropped the canisters decompose, and the young trees take root.

Dr. Walters had done tests to make sure the trees survived the fall from the plane, and Moshe Alamaro invented the canister that made sure the trees would take root and grow.

Furthermore, Alamaro’s system is overseen by an airborne surveillance system, which guarantees the safety of people who may be on the ground and also monitors the early growth of the trees. Alamaro founded the company Aerial Reforestation, Inc. in Newton, MA to develop the technology.

There has been a renewed interest in aerial reforestation in recent years. For example, the government of Thailand has initiated a five-year pilot project that uses aerial reforestation to boost forest regeneration over deteriorated forests.

The system will work in any area where trees once grew but there is a particular interest in creating new forests on empty landscapes. Even in desert areas, the cones can be adapted for planting suitable desert shrubs.

In fact, Iceland has already done something similar. In 2005, the BBC reported that “Iceland is big and sparsely populated. There are few roads. So, Icelanders decided to ‘bomb their own country’, dropping special mixtures of fertilizer and seeds from a World War II DC 3 Dakota bomber”—carpet-bombing the subarctic desert in an attempt to make that emptiness flower.

Moshe Alamaro visited us at the RYAL Institute in 2001. When it was explained to him that his invention was part of the Swords Into Plowshares transformation fulfilling the Messianic prophecy of Isaiah, he said that he was very happy to be a part of it.

The Forest and the Trees

We have been talking about forests. What do we learn from them? There is an expression that one “can’t see the forest for the trees,” meaning that he is so focused on the details that he misses the big picture. This may happen when we see a נס מלובש בדרכי הטבע — a miracle embedded in nature—such as the Purim miracle, where each individual event appeared as a natural occurrence; only when you look at the entire sequence of events, the overall pattern, do we realize that a miracle has happened, as the Rebbe MHM has explained.

But sometimes the reverse is true. There are situations where we think we grasp the big picture but then we find one small detail that doesn’t fit the pattern, requiring that we have to overturn our previous understanding and come up with an entirely new explanation. We see this in the Rebbe MHM’s Rashi Sichos, where he overturns an initial explanation of the Rashi based on one detail that doesn’t fit, and then presents an entirely new explanation. Some new scientific theories (להבדיל) have been discovered because of one observation that did not fit the previous theory.

So, we have to keep one eye on the forest and one eye on the trees. (Is that why we have two eyes?)

Each of the Swords into Plowshares developments that we have been discussing in recent articles is an amazing event in its own right but when we look at many of them together we realize that it’s not just one sword beaten into a plow, but there is a new attitude among the nations of the world (as the UN Secretary General said in 1992), that the transformation of military technology for peaceful uses is “the trend of history” (as the physicists at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics have said), following up on what the Rebbe MHM said: that the nations of the world have announced “a new era in international relations— stopping the situation of warfare among the nations of the world…cooperation and mutual aid among the nations of the world for the good of all mankind.” ■