62 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com C o m m u n i t y Above L-R: USAF retired Major Generals John Olson and Matthew Burger; Below: Gen. Olson, Hood Whitson, Governor Greg Abbott You can measure the severity of your problem by who is sent to fix it. While prior generations of elected offi- cials at the City of Corpus Christi can be rightly blamed for selling the public water supply to industrial users without a plan to replace it, those decisions might be what ultimately saves the city from complete collapse. The fact is that a “classified majority” of military jet fuel is refined at the Port of Corpus Christi, which makes a threat to its production a matter of national security. Dr. John Olson is a retired United States Air Force Major General who also served in the same rank in the U.S. Space Force, before retiring a second time in 2024. With a total of six engineering degrees includ- ing a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering and executive management training at Harvard, MIT, and Johns Hopkins University, plus a fluency in at least six languages, General Olson is the most educated per- son in the Department of War, where he serves as a special government employee, post-retirement. Olson worked at NASA for over a decade during the time in which, as he describes, “Elon Musk was blowing up more rockets than he was successfully launching.” Add to his credentials General Olson’s role as the first Artificial Intelligence chief of the Air Force, his com- mand of the 16th Air Force Cyber Command at Joint Base Lackland in San Antonio, where he oversaw over 49,000 personnel, and of greatest importance, his role as commander of the Looking Glass Airborne Nuclear Command Post, answering directly to the President. At one point in his career, General Olson held all of our lives in his hands while in command of America’s nu- clear weapons, putting him in a unique class as one of the world’s most trusted human beings—not to men- tion that he has flown 83 different military aircraft, making him one of the most accomplished pilots in the history of the Air Force. Wow, we must have one helluva big problem! After two lengthy conversations with this editor at the end of February, just as President Trump was visiting Corpus Christi and vowing to help us with a seawater desalination plant, General Olson had taken on the mission of building the biggest plant of its kind in the U.S. on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Within a week, he was in Vienna, Austria, in front of the owner of Europe’s most advanced mobile power generation manufacturer, RSE, which builds in the Czech Repub- lic and has been helping power Ukraine, since it was invaded by Russia. The RSE system utilizes Caterpillar natural gas generators, controlled by Mercedes-Benz technology, to produce highly-efficient, safe and quiet electricity at 99%+ reliability. Understanding the on- coming demand for mobile, flexible power systems for
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